Aussie-struck

Starting to follow the Aussie Millions here, mostly via the PokerNews updates, as they’re covering all 24 of the events. The PokerStars blog guys will be doing their thing as well starting with the Main Event, and with Jason Somerville also streaming over Twitch there will be no shortage of updates from down under.

The Aussie Millions always coincides with the Australian Open, which like all of the majors in tennis gets a lot of coverage also on the teevee. We get a half-dozen channels all devoted to showing every match on every court, which makes it pretty easy to follow the two-week long men’s and women’s tournaments.

Of course, the time difference between here in the Eastern time zone and Melbourne affects things when it comes to following either the poker or the tennis from afar. It’s a 16-hour difference, meaning when I watch a match tonight it’ll be happening Friday morning, or a little later when I follow the coverage from the Crown they will already be into the afternoon tomorrow.

I think about all the people I was just with in Nassau a little over a week ago, and how at this moment we are now just about 10,000 miles apart yet completely in touch with one another, exchanging emails and text messages and able to talk at an instant over Skype or WhatsApp or in many other ways just as if we were in neighboring hotel rooms.

Hard not to be a little awestruck by it all, even if we now take all of this ease of communication and travel for granted.

Photo: “Location of Australia,” Ssolbergj. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Serena Stunner

Was working this afternoon with the U.S. Open playing on the teevee, pretty much the way it has gone for the last 10 days or so after my return from Barcelona.

Tennis probably ranks fourth or fifth on my list of favorite sports to watch (with the NFL and NBA up top). As with golf, it is really only the majors that encourage me to tune in when it comes to tennis. I’ll happily leave the set on all day and night during the two weeks of Wimbledon, the French, and the U.S. Open. (Not so much during the Australian, because of the time difference.)

My viewing goes back and forth between passive awareness of how matches are progressing and concluding and active following of every point near the ends of sets or matches.

Today I can’t say I even really paid much attention at all to Flavia Panetta’s quick handling of the No. 2 seed Simona Halep in the day’s first match. I’d seen several of Halep’s matches leading up to today’s, and considering her high seed I’d guessed she was going to be a finalist, so the 6-1 6-3 result was kind of eyebrow-raising.

Then came Serena Williams’s match with Roberta Vinci. I looked up for a while before it began to hear the commentators talk about “David versus Goliath” and speculate how quickly the match would be completed, none thinking for a moment that Williams could possibly lose to the unseeded Italian.

The first set was over in a flash, won by Williams 6-2, and I’d moved fully into passive mode as they moved through the second set. Saw Vinci -- who at age 32 is older than the average player although a year younger than Williams -- was up a break, then watched as she managed to hold on to win that one 6-4, and suddenly I was setting work aside to see what was going to happen next.

The third set was a strange one, with Williams breaking Vinci early to go up 2-0 and seemingly in position to cruise into yet another major final. But Vinci broke back right away and seeing her rallying herself and the New York crowd it suddenly became obvious she wasn’t going to be an easy out. Soon she was up a break, and after Williams missed an opportunity to break back (having a couple of break points to do so), it was all crazily pointing to one of those huge, impossible-to-have-foreseen upsets.

The last game was almost an anticlimax, with Vinci clinching the set 6-4 to stop Williams’s run at the grand slam. Stunningly. The Italian’s post-match interview was terrific. “Today is my day, sorry guys!” she said, and it was impossible not to grin in response.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. After all, Vinci’s name literally means “win.”

Afterwards the commentators tried to find examples from other sports with which to compare the magnitude of the upset, with the usuals (Villanova over Georgetown, Douglas over Tyson, etc.) being highlighted.

From poker I was harkening back to Hal Fowler defeating Bobby Hoff heads-up at the 1979 WSOP as a closer analogue than Moneymaker over Farha. This evening I saw Pamela Maldonado make what was probably an even better comparison over Twitter, bringing up Joe McKeehen’s knockout of Daniel Negreanu two spots shy of the November Nine back in July and noting McKeehen’s similarly sympathetic-while-competitive response afterwards.

The favorite-underdog dynamic makes poker an exciting game, since in every hand the dog still has a chance. In sports, too, it adds a layer of interest as we watch to find out how what happens compares to what was thought would happen. And there, too, do the favorites -- even the greatest ones -- sometimes fall.

Speaking Out

The Aussie Millions is underway, which means tennis’ Australian Open -- also in Melbourne -- has begun as well.

I was intrigued this morning to read about a bit of a rift having occurred between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer regarding the latter’s unwillingness to pipe up about certain undesirable tour conditions -- including an overloaded schedule.

It sounds like various issues have arisen over recent months regarding the ATP, including discontent surrounding the scheduling of Davis Cup matches in February right on the heels of the Australian Open. Apparently the pro tennis schedule is especially packed this year thanks in part to the 2012 Olympics.

Nadal has spoken out about the problems in recent months, as has the Scottish player Andy Murray. Meanwhile, Roger Federer has kept mostly mum, something Nadal alluded to when asked at a pre-Australian Open news conference about the scheduling issues.

Nadal was asked specifically about Federer’s not speaking out and whether he took that to indicate that Federer believed it wasn’t good for tennis’ image to have players complaining. “For him it’s good to say nothing,” said the Spanish player somewhat facetiously (via a translator). “‘It’s all well and good for me, I look like a gentleman,’ [says Federer] and the rest can burn themselves.”

The press may be blowing up this story more than is really warranted. Both Nadal and Federer have a long tradition of being great examples of sportsmanship and highly respectful of each other’s games. Even so, it does appear that there are a few problems being faced by professional tennis at the moment, including the problem of being willing to acknowledge such problems in a public forum.

The story reminded me a little of some of the considerable problems in poker -- live and online -- and the way some players and media are more than willing to address them while others are not.

I’m thinking of writers like Jesse May speaking out last summer and fall about the sorry circumstance created by the Full Tilt fiasco and other related matters. Or Daniel Negreanu’s “Being Real” blog post from last October in which he addressed a host of different concerns, some more personal than others.

I also thought about Matt Glantz’ post on the Epic Poker blog from a couple of weeks ago titled “Responsibility in Poker” in which he addressed poker’s image in mainstream culture and suggested ways in which current pros could help improve it.

Finally, I was reminded of a lengthy blog post penned just yesterday by Phil Galfond titled “Let’s Make Some Changes” in which he addresses all sorts of problems currently plaguing online poker, including various examples of “angle shooting” and other sorta-tolerated-but-ethically-sketchy practices he believes are hurting the game.

There’s always some element of risk associated with putting oneself out there and taking positions regarding issues over which there exist legitimate debate -- i.e., over which reasonable people disagree. Particularly when doing so could in some way negatively affect one’s own bottom line in some fashion, either directly or indirectly.

Not going to suggest some trite comparison between reforms in tennis and/or poker and other, more serious reforms which a holiday like MLK day invites us to contemplate. Nor do I mean to suggest I necessarily agree with all of the reforms proposed by those mentioned above. But it does seem an appropriate day to note the need to talk about problems when they arise. And, even more importantly, to be willing to listen, too.

Matching Up Poker and Tennis

Was up late again last night watching Event #13 of PokerStars’ World Championship of Online Poker, the $300+$20 Seven-Card Stud event. Early in the evening, I had the U.S. Open on as well, watching the hard-fought, three-set battle between the 19-year-old Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark (pictured) and the Russian Svetlana Kuznetsova.

I tend to enjoy watching the women’s matches more than the men, if only because the points tend to go longer, and so there’s more of a chance for some drama and suspense to be built up in a given point. The Wozniacki-Kuznetsova match was just terrific in this regard, with a lot of wild, lengthy rallies and spectacular winners that made you go “wow.”

The 19-year-old Wozniacki eventually took it down, outlasting Kuznetsova in three sets 2-6, 7-6, 7-6. She’ll now play the American Melanie Oudin in the quarterfinals, another teen sensation who also came back to beat a higher-seeded Russian yesterday, defeating Nadia Petrova 1-6, 7-6, 6-3.

While I was watching the Wozniacki-Kuznetsova match conclude, I had one of the stud tables open on the laptop, kind of idly noting hands go by when the players were between points. Perhaps unsurprisingly I started to become aware of the many similarities between tennis and poker. Probably goes for any poker variant, but somehow stud seemed especially poker-like last night.

Most stud hands tend to become heads up by fourth street, and thus more readily resemble the back-and-forth of tennis from that point forward. As hands developed, the betting reminded me of two players volleying, with a raise or three-bet looking like an attempt at a passing shot or hitting a line, trying to end the “point” right then and there. Some would prove winners; others “unforced errors.”

The fixed limit betting format also seemed to reinforce the comparison, insofar as the players’ relative status changed only incrementally, bet by bet, hand by hand. No one could win it all on a single play, but only by the lengthy accumulation of actions and results.

Finally, I found myself contemplating the whole “luck-vs.-skill” debate in light of the analogy I was almost involuntarily tracing. Certainly I was witnessing awesome displays of skill by Wozniacki and Kuznetsova, both in terms of athletic prowess and strategic, on-the-fly decision making.

But the players’ relative skill levels also helped create what seemed to be “lucky” moments here and there. I don’t have the stats before me, but it was clear Kuznetsova played a higher-risk (or “looser”) style, thereby hitting more winners (and aces) while committing more unforced errors (and double-faults). Some points would develop in such a manner that one player appeared to have a decided advantage -- like having positional advantage or the better starting hand in poker -- yet the other would somehow find a way to steal the point, to “get lucky” (so to speak) thanks to a fortunate bounce or a slight mistake from her opponent.

Yes, there’s definitely some degree of “luck” in tennis -- or at least elements of the game that, as is the case in poker, are constantly out of the player’s control. But like in poker, the skillful players tend to win out over time, and a match (or tournament) generally goes on long enough to ensure that will usually be the case.

There are many other parallels one could pursue -- momentum, confidence, focus, reading opponents’ strengths and weakness, and so forth. One of the winners of a WCOOP event, Joel Adam Gordon (a.k.a. “2FLY2TILT”) who won Event #4, the No-Limit 2-7 Single Draw event, and who also did well in last night’s stud event, made a similar comparison in his post-tourney interview with Otis. Said Gordon, he was “aiming to be one of the most versatile and well-rounded players around,” likening himself to “a tennis player who can play well on all surfaces.”

Yea, there are lots of ways to go with this analogy. I’ll stop there, though, and let you think about them. Ball’s in your court.