Tracking Travels

The year is nearly done, and I’m again recalling other end-of-year posts including many from the first several years of the blog that spent a lot of effort measuring (or at least summarizing) what had happened over the previous twelve months.

Anyone happening by here who happens to scroll down and look along the right-hand column will notice how I’ve been scribbling away on a constant basis since April 2006, meaning I’m more than halfway through a tenth year of all this chronicling of my poker-related thoughts. And thoughts that aren’t necessarily poker-related, yet I’ve found a way to relate them to poker, anyway.

One personal benefit of having carried on at such length with a blog is the way it helps me remember details of things I myself have done, as well as sometimes helping me track down particulars of various stories or events from the poker world over the last near-decade (if, of course, I happened to have written anything about them).

For example, to highlight a personal item, I was trying this week to recall how many poker-related trips I’d taken in 2015. Given enough time, I could probably do so on my own, but a quick check through all my “travel report” posts here helped me find the answer a lot more quickly.

I took six trips altogether -- to the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in Nassau, Bahamas, LAPT Chile in Viña del Mar, the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo, LAPT Peru in Lima, EPT Barcelona, and the LAPT Grand Final in São Paulo, Brazil. It’s a good number for me -- enough to be out and about a lot, but not so many that I’m away from the farm more than I’d like to be.

I know in previous years I’ve had more trips. And of course those years when I’d go to Vegas all summer for the World Series of Poker I’ve been away from home more days total, though for the last couple of summers I’ve stayed home.

I’m suddenly mindful this week of this sort of counting exercise -- and of exercise, generally speaking -- thanks to Vera Valmore’s mother giving me a FitBit for Christmas. The stats I’ve been most intrigued by so far have been the ones related to my sleep (how long I’m sleeping, how restless I am, and how many times I’m waking up), what my heart rate is and how it goes up and down during the course of a day, and the number of steps I’m taking and miles I’m covering each day.

There’s more I could be tracking with this sucker, and perhaps I will eventually. Reminds me a little of the endless stats produced by PokerTracker and Hold’em Manager when playing online, measuring and tabulating every last movement you make.

It’s also making me remember how sometimes I’d become conscious of all the measuring going on, knowing whenever I would three-bet (or perform any other action) how that would affect the percentage for the session. So, too, with the FitBit it’s easy to be encouraged to walk a few extra steps to reach a particular number and the like.

Meanwhile, I’m starting to think about my next trip when I’ll be going back to the Bahamas next week for the 2016 PCA. Kind of curious to see how many steps I take and miles I cover in a typical day of tournament reporting. Yet another way to track my travels.

Play the Cards You’re Dealt

The advice to “play the cards you’re dealt” is one of those many poker clichés you’ll hear come up in non-poker contexts. In fact, now that I think about it, you probably hear the phrase uttered more often away from the poker table than at it.

After all, it seems kind of superfluous to remind each other while at the table you have to play the cards the dealer delivers to you. But in other situations, that recommendation to be realistic (or content) about what you can accomplish with whatever resources you have is perhaps better served by the poker metaphor.

The phrase occurred to me today while reading about the Philadelphia Eagles letting go of Chip Kelly just a game shy of the end of his third season with the club. The article I was reading appears on the ESPN site and is called “Why the Chip Kelly experiment didn’t work.” That title highlights the way the head coach who eventually also became the team’s general manager (and thus controlled personnel) has always been regarded as a kind of iconoclast who deliberately deviates from usual strategies when it came to managing and coaching NFL teams.

I remember writing a blog post here discussing Kelly way back at the very beginning of his tenure with the Eagles, one in which I was complaining about my Carolina Panthers’ conservative play-calling and drawing a contrast between them and Kelly’s team. Kelly had brought his no-huddle hurry-up offense from college to the pros, winning his first game in splashy fashion and making teams like Carolina suddenly seem sluggish and unimaginative. (Funny now, of course, to think of how differently the next three years would go for both clubs.)

Going without a huddle was just the most conspicuous of many against-the-grain methods Kelly tried to employ at Philadelphia, and the ESPN article breaks down in detail other aspects of his “system” and why it ultimately didn’t produce overwhelming success. (It didn’t exactly fail, either, as Kelly went 26-21 during his almost three years at the helm.)

Some of the other areas in which Kelly didn’t necessarily play “by the book” (or tried to write his own) had to do with reducing the number and complexity of offensive plays, introducing different practice schedules and routines, involving a “sports science program” to help with conditioning, and “an enormous emphasis on measurables” when it came to filling out a roster. That latter point somewhat curiously refers to the physical size of players (“Cornerbacks had to be a certain height. Defensive lineman had to have the proper arm length.”), and not to the statistics produced on the field.

All of it suggests a kind of stubbornness that saw Kelly trying to make certain players fit into predetermined roles and “schemes.” “The word Kelly constantly harped on was execution,” goes the article. “But players are not robots.... When players fail to execute, it ultimately means they are not good enough or the coaches are not doing their jobs.”

I’m sure this summary simplifies what actually happened when it came to game-plan creation and calling plays. But the impression remains that Kelly had ideas about what a winning strategy was -- a theory -- that when put into practice failed to realize the goals of that strategy at least in part because of the personnel Kelly had. And after he became GM, he assumed responsibility for that, too, and thus a certain measure of culpability when the players he’d chosen failed to execute the plans he’d made for them.

The poker equivalent would seem to be a player having certain ideas about, say, position and stack sizes, yet not appreciating the importance of the cards, too. That is to say, a player who didn’t necessarily agree with the idea that you should “play the cards you’re dealt,” choosing instead to play the same way regardless of his hand. Which can work sometimes, but sometimes does not.

As GM Kelly could to a certain extent choose the “cards” he could then play, but only according to the limitations of current player availability and salary considerations. It does seem clear, though, that he sometimes found himself playing his “cards” in unusual ways, a consequence of his “system” or method of playing that didn’t necessarily appreciate the limitations of his “hand.”

Whatever the case, the Eagles finally decided they had one Chip too many.

Talking Nixon, Movies, Sports & Horses On the Thinking Poker Podcast

Quick post today to report the latest episode of The Thinking Poker podcast is now online (Episode 154), and your humble scribbler is the guest. No shinola!

After the usual strategy talk comes about an hour-long conversation between myself and co-hosts Nate Meyvis and Andrew Brokos. We ended up covering a number of different topics, starting out with my two college courses “Poker in American Film and Culture” and “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics.”

Since I just wrapped up teaching the Nixon class for the first time, I talk for a while about Nixon and his poker story. Donald Trump came up in there, too, along with some discussion about how politics and campaigning has changed over the last half-century or so.

Then we moved over into discussing in a more general way poker’s place in American culture before circling back to the “Poker in American Film and Culture” course and some talk about A Streetcar Named Desire, The Odd Couple, and John Wayne movies.

Toward the latter part of the hour we focused a bit on sports and the rise of analytics, moved over to chat about horses and farm life (and parallels between dressage and poker), and then I espoused the much underrated virtues of cleaning stalls.

If you’re curious, get started on those New Year’s resolutions early and go for a walk or jog, and while you do give the show a listen. And if you do, you can let me know what you were thinking when listening to the Thinking Poker Podcast.

Games, Grins, and Meadowlark

Was sad to read this morning about the passing of Meadowlark Lemon, the famous Harlem Globetrotter and North Carolina native. Spent time this morning reading about his interesting life, then remembering the time when as a kid I had a chance to see Lemon and the Globetrotters in the late 1970s.

It had to have been one of Lemon’s last games with the team, as I’m being reminded today he left the Globetrotters in 1978 after 22 years with the barnstorming group of riotous roundballers. They played the Washington Generals, natch. And beat them, natch. Lemon sunk a hook shot from half-court, tossed a water cooler full of confetti on spectators in the first row, and shot a free throw with rubberbands attached to the ball so it sprung back into his hands.

As a kid I recall that the distinction between the Globetrotters and other basketball teams -- i.e., “real” ones such as in the NBA -- wasn’t exactly one hundred percent clear. Eventually I figured out their games were more like highly entertaining exhibitions than actual competitions, but I don’t think I understood that to be the case that night at the Greensboro Coliseum when I saw them.

Of course, the Globetrotters were always about making audiences laugh and have fun, with basketball serving as a kind of unique comedic medium in which to perform their specialized brand of theater. That Lemon was inducted into both the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the International Clown Hall of Fame is fitting, given how his contributions were equally significant in both realms.

I often write about poker being about more than simply winning money or even competing, but like other games (and sports) also about enjoying others’ company and also perhaps participating in a kind of “show” in which the players are the performers. Poker also obviously brings together people of disparate backgrounds, providing a context to interact and even create communities among themselves. Basketball (and other sports) function similarly for many as well.

Doyle Brunson was also a basketball player, and in The Godfather of Poker he writes a bit about other parallels between the sport and the card game. There’s also a chapter in there near the middle where Brunson describes a kind of crisis of faith he endured following the death of his daughter, Doyla. In the early 1980s he got reacquainted with Christianity and even for about a year-and-a-half helped organize some “Bible studies” among players in Las Vegas. To make things more interesting, he’d bring in celebrity speakers and Meadowlark Lemon -- who’d become an ordained minister in 1986 -- was one of them.

One other thought comes to mind when searching for connections between the Harlem Globetrotters and poker. As the Globetrotters became more and more popular during the 1970s -- a true pop culture phenomenon -- they helped make basketball more popular, too. Many point to that moment at the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s when the NBA really took off (with Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and a little later Michael Jordan), saying how the Globetrotters had kind of set the stage for that explosion in popularity some respects by having brought b-ball to larger audiences in the preceding years.

The Globetrotters played what might be called an “exaggerated” version of the game, a somewhat distorted image perhaps which -- as I mentioned before -- as a kid I didn’t necessarily realize was all that different from “real” basketball. Poker kind of underwent something like that, too, with the “boom” of televised poker in the 2000s and a presentation that introduced poker to many in a kind of “exaggerated” fashion that wasn’t exactly what most poker really was (or is).

I guess there’s something about that image of the Globetrotters in a circle, passing the ball around as “Sweet Georgia Brown” whistles along as the soundtrack, that resembles a poker table, too.

Except it’s chips we’re passing back and forth, not a ball. And perhaps doing a few tricks with as well.

Handling the Unexpected

Happy Christmas, all.

We’re sticking close to the farm today, where it has gotten up to an unexpectedly balmy 70 degrees during the afternoon. Sunny skies, too, for much of the day early on, although clouds have drifted in over the last couple of hours in advance of some more rain. Or so the forecasters are saying.

Speaking of things getting cloudy, the last few days have included some unforeseen “crises” that might’ve made the holiday season even more stressful than it usually is. Started on Sunday with a horse-related emergency, something I was referencing earlier in the week when talking about being pulled away from that Panthers-Giants game. Everyone is fine, but for a short while we were worried it might not be.

Then on Tuesday night we discovered a possible issue regarding our electricity for the house and barn, which when we got an electrician out here Wednesday morning we learned was potentially very serious (and dangerous). I’ll forgo a tedious rehearsal of the details, but suffice to say that, too, could have been a lot worse had we not gotten things looked at and remedied when we did.

Yesterday then provided us with another bit of unanticipated misfortune -- a flat tire coming back from a visit with family. Things were made even more complicated due to the lack of an available spare (and the fact that it was Christmas Eve), but we were able to work things out well enough and got back home to wake up here and spend the day with our four-legged friends.

Added all together, all of that kind of put us in a weird frame of mind here this Christmas day, feeling both a little put upon after the sequence of misfortune but glad as well that we avoided even worse luck.

Before all that happened, we had a fun surprise visit from the poker pro Alec Torelli and his wife, Ambra, who ended up swinging by a week ago while in the middle of their own adventures in travel that involving unplanned-for detour. They ended up spending a few hours with us on the farm last Friday, with Ambra getting a first-ever horse riding lesson while they were here. Was a ton of fun from which we all got to take a away a neat memory.

Earlier this week Alec shared a new “Hand of the Day” video on PokerNews involving a hand someone had sent to him. In the hand the player had gotten himself into a tricky spot having to play a big pot out of position. A not-so-great decision early in the hand coupled with a little bit of misfortune afterwards put the player in an awkward position. While discussing the hand, Alec pointed out how even after we find ourselves in unfavorable circumstances we still have to try to make good decisions going forward (and not worry too much -- or really at all -- about how we got there).

It’s good advice, I think -- to make the best of things regardless of the luck you’ve encountered or the mistakes you might have made. Play each hand well, and enjoy yourself, too, if you can.

Hanging out with Sammy and Maggie (pictured at left) and Shakan (up above) makes it easier to remember that stuff. They’re all three pretty laid back, for the most part.

They don’t seem to mind this unexpected weather too much, either.

Hearthstoned

I’ve become vaguely aware of the way some in the poker world -- especially those in the hardcore online crowd -- are now taking up another game called Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.

Saw something last month about Team PokerStars Pro Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier getting signed as a “Hearthstone Pro” for something called Team Liquid. Then yesterday an item came over the transom that Full Tilt had partnered up with G2 eSports’ Hearthstone team, further suggesting a kind of link between poker and this relatively new card-based game. (Or perhaps furthering the disassociation of Full Tilt from poker, the site having dropped the third word of its original name some time ago.)

Still in the dark about it, I went to Wikipedia to find out a little about the history behind Hearthstone and an introduction to how it is played. Got quickly bogged down, I’ll confess, by the second paragraph of the section on game play, which begins as follows:

“Hearthstone is supported by micropayments for booster packs, Arena Mode entries, Adventure Mode wing access and alternate hero skins. Unlike other card games, Hearthstone does not use a trading card system and instead allows players to ‘disenchant’ unwanted cards into ‘arcane dust’ resource, which can then be used to ‘craft’ new cards of the player’s choice.”

One reason why I couldn’t get much further along in my introduction to the game was the fact that I found these sentences so intrinsically humorous to read, with the scare quotes around those key words adding greatly to my amusement. And my disorientation, the effort needed to imagine the “Hearthstone universe” almost verging on the hallucinatory.

I believe there are a total of eight items in these two sentences for which I have almost zero idea what they signify, although for each I know I could speculate down a path that would surely lead me to an erroneous conclusion about each -- a conclusion that would likely seem just as humorous to the knowlegeable Hearthstone player.

I suspect an acquaintance with Magic: The Gathering or other similar games would likely make Hearthstone seem less opaque to the novice. Would also help to have both an intellectual capacity for such games and an inclination to learn them. As you might guess, I’m limited in both respects, so I have to confess that I’m still pretty clueless about all of the different game modes, how matches work, and the game’s 698 different collectible cards (!).

That passage above made me think about how just about every game has its own set of lingo, rules, scoring, etiquette, and other elements that seem like utterly alien bits of arcana -- or “arcane dust” -- to the uninitiated. Poker is certainly like that. Even games like tennis or baseball can be hard to explain to those without any prior acquaintance either as an observer or player.

Anyhow, looking forward to my next game of 2-7 triple draw when I plan to disenchant unwanted cards into the arcane dust before crafting new ones to add to my hand.

Panthers Playing the Big Stack

I’ve was in the Charlotte airport a couple of times near the end of November. It’s my home airport, and one of my favorites thanks to a variety of reasons. Of course even if it didn’t have all the amenities and weren’t as easy in which to get around, I’d probably like it on some level simply because it’s home.

When you go home, there’s a kind of comfort that comes with the familiar. Many will be reminded of just this feeling over the next few days while reuniting with family and friends for the holidays. I’ll admit after traveling abroad I like hearing English again, and hearing it spoken by some in that Southern accent I’ve been listening to for the majority of my life to this point.

One thing I noticed when hearing those voices these last couple of times through CTL was a lot of talk about the Carolina Panthers. They were 10-0 on my way out, thumped Dallas on Thanksgiving, and so were 11-0 on my return. Now they’re 14-0 -- only the fourth team in NFL history ever to go so deep into a season without a loss. And the Panther talk is getting even louder.

Now people are starting to talk about the team outside of western North Carolina, too, not least because of that crazy New York Giants game last Sunday. Between the Giants huge comeback, the fantastic finish in which Carolina snatched away the win, and the Odell Beckham-Josh Norman sideshow it was quite a spectacle on its own, never mind the context of the Panthers trying to stay undefeated adding an extra layer of drama.

Besides the prospect of going 16-0, there’s still something on the line this Sunday when the Panthers go to Atlanta, as they haven’t quite locked up home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Some of the talk, though, has already turned toward the question of whether or not the team should rest starters heading into the playoffs.

While obviously an injury to a key player at this point would be a gut-punch, I’m hopeful Carolina will be playing to win not just against Atlanta but when they travel back home to play Tampa Bay in the regular season finale.

I remember being disappointed back in ’09 when Indianapolis got to 14-0 then rested starters during the season’s final two games, losing both. Not that I was a Colts fan (although I did live in Indiana for several years and rooted for them then), but it just seemed a bummer of a way to punctuate what was otherwise a very special season. (The Colts made the Super Bowl that year where they lost to New Orleans.)

“Our approach these last 14 games is going to be the approach that we’re going to have these next two,” says tight end Greg Olsen in a soundbite ESPN is running. He’s echoing what everyone else is saying, too, although it remains to be seen how exactly the Panthers proceed.

I’m reminded a little of that situation in poker of accumulating a big stack -- whether in a tournament or a cash game -- then having the urge to tighten up or even leave the game (if it’s cash) in order to preserve what you’ve got. I addressed this phenomenon, something I confess to be a leak of sorts in my own play, in a strategy article for PokerNews a couple of weeks back titled “Leaving to Lock Up a Win? Don’t Get Up from a Good Game.”

In football we often see a manifestation of the same principle within an individual game -- the so-called “prevent defense” designed to take away long passes, but give up short ones so as to force a trailing team to use clock while trying to catch up. “It prevents teams from winning,” goes the clichéd joke regarding the prevent defense. So, too, does the suddenly tight-playing big stack sometimes find it difficult to avoid losing chips after gearing down.

The Panthers will be big favorites in these last two regular season games versus losing teams. The playoffs will be different, though, with a number of opponents within Carolina’s conference at least the Panthers’ equal if not better, even if they’ve dropped some games along the way this year.

It’s a nice problem to have, being the big stack (so to speak) and having all the options available from which to choose. Hoping the Panthers play it well and don’t start feeling too comfortable, kind of like we feel after coming home.

A Reunion with Blackjack

Was looking over this PokerStars Caribbean Adventure schedule coming up in January. I’ll be back at the Atlantis again this time after having gotten there a year ago, and am looking forward not just to getting back together with lots of colleagues and friends -- the PCA really is like a yearly reunion in that respect -- but also to checking out some of the more intriguing side events on the schedule as always happens at the PCA and on the EPT.

There are over 100 numbered events crammed into less than two weeks (a total that includes about a dozen satellites). One non-numbered event has caught my eye, a $500 buy-in single-day blackjack event with a $100,000 guarantee.

I have a blackjack playing friend who I’ve been telling about this one. He’s a skillful player, I know, and I’ve been saying to him I imagine he’d do well in this event given the fact that it’ll probably attract a number of poker players who may not be as well versed as he is on standard blackjack strategy.

Of course, the cost would be a lot more than five hundy for him were he to take a shot. Whether he plays it or not, I’m going to be curious to see who does take part and what kind of turnout they get.

The whole idea of inserting a blackjack event in the middle of a poker festival makes me think of where poker was some 15-20 years ago -- that is to say, before the “boom” and the effort exerted by many online sites to try to distinguish poker from other casino games. The result was a whole generation of new poker players for whom the thought of mixing their beloved poker with, say, blackjack was made to seem a kind of anathema.

Before that mass education occurred, poker and blackjack overlapped a lot more readily in the minds of many. It still does, actually, in particular among those who only casually play one or the other or who don’t play at all. I remember writing something here a few years ago about that common “mistake” people make asking poker players about “counting cards,” a kind of evidence, I suppose, that for a number of people the games aren’t that distinct from one another.

As I say, it’s an unnumbered event and thus I suppose not officially considered part of the PCA schedule. Still, should be interesting to see players doing something different with their two-card starting hands in this reunion of sorts between blackjack and poker.

The Instinct to Not to Look

Yeah, I heard about Steve Harvey’s mistake, misreading the card and mistakenly announcing the runner-up as the winner at the climax of last night’s Miss Universe pageant in Las Vegas.

Saw that being passed around Twitter moments after it happened, but I didn’t click through to see any video or explore it much further. Such screw-ups can certainly be funny to watch. And in fact one of my first thoughts upon hearing the story was how on a couple of occasions I’ve watched Harvey hosting Family Feud and genuinely laughed out loud at what were basically people saying dumb things and/or screwing up (with Harvey’s wry responses accentuating the humor).

But for whatever reason I often have a hard time getting much enjoyment out of watching others fail, especially in big, conspicuous ways. Maybe I’ve built up some empathy or something after decades spent speaking before groups and/or writing for an audience, knowing how unpleasant making mistakes can be, even small ones. Whatever the cause might be, my instinct seems to be not to look. The opposite of “rubbernecking,” if there's a word for that.

Speaking of looking away, earlier on Sunday I was riveted by my Carolina Panthers delivering a thumping to the New York Giants for most of three quarters, building up a 35-7 lead while turning Giants’ star receiver Odell Beckham, Jr. into a complete basket case. I saw Beckham respond to things not going his way by picking up three personal fouls, including once obviously trying to injure Panthers cornerback Josh Norman with a helmet-to-helmet hit away from the play.

I was right on the verge of getting a little irrational myself watching Beckham’s antics when I got pulled away from the game thanks to some unavoidable business to tend to here on the farm. As a result, I missed the entire fourth quarter that saw the Giants come storming back to tie the game, with the villain Beckham actually being the one to catch the TD pass that made it 35-all.

Thankfully the Panthers were able to tack on a winning FG to win the game and preserve their undefeated season for another week. And perhaps even more thankfully, I avoided the stress of watching all of that play out, as I’m sure that like Beckham I would’ve turned into a basket case myself.

Whereas with the Harvey gaffe I looked away intentionally, with the Panthers-Giants finale I was made to not to look by circumstances beyond my control. Both examples make me think a little of how back in the day when playing poker online I’d sometimes find myself looking away from the screen during all-in situations as the board filled out street-by-street. It wasn’t superstition -- rather, it was merely a defensive gesture designed to minimize the stress of having to fade another’s outs or root for my own.

I guess it happened a few times as well that I’d look back in time to be momentarily confused by the result, thinking I’d won -- “wait, wait, wait... my straight got there! ohhhh, he’s got the flush” -- when in fact I had lost.

You know, like poor Miss Colombia. Or the Giants. Or Harvey, for whom the night’s best moment turned out to be the worst.

Another Alpha8

Was reminded a couple of days ago about having spent a week in December at the Bellagio just a couple of years ago. Was there helping cover the World Poker Tour Five Diamond World Poker Classic, which I believe was the last time that particular event had Doyle Brunson’s name on the sucker.

There were 639 entries for the $10,400 buy-in event this time around, making the prize pool close to $6.2 million. That’s up from 586 entries and a $5.68 million prize pool last year, and way up from the 449 and $4.36 million prize pool in 2013 when I was there.

Meanwhile there’s a new $100K buy-in WPT Alpha8 tournament starting today, also at the Bellagio. This one kicks off the third season of the Alpha8. A year ago they managed 55 total entries for this same event (including re-entries), the most they ever were able to get for an Alpha8, so it should be interesting to see if they manage to match or exceed that total.

Funny to think how it wasn’t that long ago that a $10K event was something relatively unique, while today even a $100K one fails to register as something all that unique. It’s still an exclusive, “boutique”-type affair, however, as indicated by the small fields and the fact that the player pool tends to be largely the same with each one that takes place.

Showing that event $100K isn’t enough for some anymore, the WPT is in fact putting on a $200,000 super high roller just after the new year as part of the WPT National Philippines Festival in Manila. There was a presser a week or so ago saying they’d already had a dozen players confirmed for the event.

Wonder how many they’ll ultimately draw. One thing for certain -- the player pool will likely include several businessmen and others we haven’t seen on the super high roller player lists before.