When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Lemonade, But When Life Hands You a Load of Crap, Don't Make Anything (Trust Me)

Headachy day yesterday, highlighted by unusually bad traffic coming home from work. Rather than the usual 45 minutes the trip normally takes, it was about two hours before I finally made it to my doorstep. Spending nearly three hours of one’s day behind the wheel is no way to live (unless one drives a taxi or truck, I guess).

Problem is, I live in close proximity to a largish lake, which means unless I want to swim home there are only two possible routes, the interstate or the state road. A wreck or some other snafu on one tends to back up both, in which case the choice one makes really doesn’t matter all that much. Yr stuck following the path you chose. And you get a lot of time to brood about your choice, too.

Once I did finally make it home, I probably should have just gone for my run rather than hop on the computer to try to squeeze in a few hands of 6-max LHE. After getting off to a hot start here in March, yesterday’s session was cold, cold, cold. Made a poor decision or two here and there, but felt mostly that circumstances were conspiring against me to ensure a losing day.

Had a very loose guy on my left, yet somehow when it folded to me and I’d raise with pocket kings from the small blind he’d know to fold. Got A-A a little later in the cutoff, open-raised, and all folded. Meanwhile, when I’d open-raise with Q-10 or the like, I’d get three-bet.

Then came hand where I was dealt 10-6 in the big blind, the table folded to the button who limped (typical for him; he was not a very savvy player), and the SB folded. Flop came J-10-3, I bet, he called. He’d not really shown much in the way of cleverness, so I doubted he had the jack (he would raise), and most likely he either had a better ten or maybe A-3. Turn was a six, giving me two pair. I bet, and he raised. I was sure I had him, and so three-bet. He just called. The river was a king, I decided just to check-call, and he showed pocket treys for the set.

Good hands, bad hands -- either way it seemed I was screwed. Kind of like my drive home. By the time I logged off it was too dark to run, so I hit the gym and rode the stationary bike for a half-hour.

Dominated that friggin’ bike, by the way. Although it felt a bit like my drive home -- a lot of pedaling without getting anywheres.

All that time in the car does allow me to catch up on podcasts, though, and yesterday I listened to a new one. Following cmitch’s tip (over on O-Poker), I had downloaded a couple of episodes of a show called Mediocre Poker, a relatively new one out of Washington, DC that started up last fall.

The hosts, Bret and EB, sound like a couple of fairly serious non-pros who play a lot of NLHE online. I listened to their two-part interview with Cole South, the high-stakes online pro who was on Poker After Dark a week or two ago. South is also the co-author of that $1,850 e-book titled Let There Be Range that I wrote about back in December.

Have to say, unlike happens with Bart Hanson’s Deuces Cracked show where I can usually get into the conversations about high-stakes happenings and strategy, I couldn’t really identify much with anything South had to say about the management of his multimillion-dollar bankroll. Still was a fun listen, with the hosts asking a number of questions we micro/low limit guys might well have asked, too.

And I like the show’s title -- both humble and euphonious.

Scanning back through the Mediocre Poker archives, I’m seeing a number of shows with other interesting guests, including Taylor Caby, Eugene Todd (bro), Dusty “leatherass” Schmidt, Jason Rosenkrantz, Gavin Griffin, Tiffany Michelle, Brad Booth, and some other online phenom types. Most recently they’ve had Mori Eskandani (producer of High Stakes Poker, Poker After Dark, and a bunch of other poker shows) and Greg Raymer as guests. And next week they’re having Phil “OMGClayAiken” Galfond.

I believe the show originally airs on a DC radio station, then gets posted as a podcast. In any event, sounds like a decent one to add to the line-up, so I thought I’d echo cmitch’s recommendation and let you know about it, if you hadn’t heard of it already.

Hey, if I’m gonna be stuck in the car like this, I might as well be useful to someone. Here’s hoping our timing is much better today.

(By the way, that post title ain’t my invention, although I don’t know who originated it. Thought it more fun than my first title idea: “Goin’ Down the Road, Feelin’ Mediocre.”)

The Recreational Poker Player

In poker, a lot is made of the distinction between “professional” and “amateur.” Arguably everyone who plays poker can say he or she belongs to one or the other category, even if not everyone can agree on how exactly to define the two groups.

In some respects, this feature does not make poker that different from other endeavors in which people demonstrate varying levels of skill, with some percentage (usually small) achieving a status that brings them enough financial reward for their efforts to be regarded as those of a “pro.” Analogies are easy to find -- from sports (golf, bowling, dressage) to art (writing, painting, photography) to entertainment (music, drama) to other areas of our culture. Indeed, practically any pursuit for which one can potentially receive payment and thus “make a living” invites the separation of its participants into the two categories.

Then again, poker is also different from all of these other activities in that it not only takes money to play, but the exchange of money is part of the activity itself. (One can play poker without money, but no one ever asks whether the person who plays for “play money” is a pro or amateur, so we’ll set that aside.)

In other words, even some amateurs are -- technically speaking -- making money, with a few of those distinguishing themselves significantly from their opponents by making a lot more money, relatively speaking. Thus arises some fuzziness between the categories, with lots of disagreement over just what constitutes being a “professional.”

In Elements of Poker, Tommy Angelo has a section titled “Going Pro?” in which he “define[s] a professional poker player as someone who either quits a job to play poker, or never had a job and plays poker instead of getting one.” It is a matter of commitment, Angelo suggests, whereby one forgoes that other possible existence -- the “normal” one in which one’s living comes not from poker but some other source -- and instead necessarily devotes most (or all) of one’s available time and energy to poker.

Doing so “requires a tremendous amount of poker playing, poker thinking, poker talking, listening, reading, and writing,” says Angelo, adding that “there isn’t quite enough time in a normal life to hold down a normal job, maintain normal relationships, and [also] be a poker monster.”

Kind of funny that Angelo would use that word “monster” there at the end, suggesting both a very successful poker player and someone who is somehow not human (or “normal”). His point is clear enough, though, and is echoed by many other poker writers, too -- one should never take lightly the business of becoming a poker pro, as it requires a significant reorientation of one’s self-image that will potentially affect all areas of one’s life.

However, some of us have trouble with declaring ourselves “amateur” players, too, as even that designation seems to involve some degree of commitment to the game not all of us are willing to make.

Maybe that hesitancy partially comes from the fact that poker isn’t unequivocally acknowledged by much of society as an acceptable pursuit (morally speaking). To say one is an “amateur player” implicitly engages one in an argument about poker, and not all of us want to get involved in such arguments all the time -- even those of us who can debate the point knowledgeably and effectively.

The fact is, whenever I am asked about my poker playing, I almost never say I am an “amateur.” Rather, I usually declare myself a “recreational” player, which some might say is really just another way of saying “amateur,” although in my mind I assign the term a particular meaning which makes “recreational” signify something slightly different.

An “amateur” generally does what he or she does for pleasure, not profit. That’s what is usually meant by the term, anyway, although we can talk about, say, Olympians or college athletes who are very, very serious about what they do and who are not in it strictly for pleasure, but the desire for competition and/or other motives. In fact, in just about every pursuit where the term comes up, it is the “not profit” part of the definition that makes the “amateur” an amateur (not the “for pleasure” part).

Which brings us back to that earlier-mentioned problem with using the term with reference to poker players. Because amateur poker players do play for profit. And some earn a bit here and there, too.

The term “recreational” also refers to someone looking for pleasure or enjoyment, with the added connotation of seeking to relax or find respite from the stressors of one’s life. And whereas the definition of “amateur” wants to exclude profit-seeking, making a little cabbage can still be a primary motive for a recreational poker player, though it doesn’t have to be.

I also like the etymological significance of the word, which suggests one “recreates” oneself -- or “recovers” or “restores” -- when pursuing that activity. Poker does that for me, giving me intellectual stimulation, satisfying competitive desires, and adding a bit of controlled, manageable uncertainty into my life.

So while I might partly use the term as a self-descriptor either out of (1) an unwillingness to “commit” even so far as declaring oneself an “amateur” seems to imply or (2) in response to society’s moral prejudice against poker, to say I’m a “recreational player” nevertheless has meaning to me.

And like any good existentialist (professional, amateur, and/or recreational), I’m all about making meaning.

2009 NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship Starts Friday

The fifth NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship will be played out later this week. On Thursday evening they will draw to fill out the brackets for the 64 participants, then the tourney will be played out over the next three days (March 6-8) at Caesars Palace in Vegas. The sucker will subsequently be repackaged as 12 hours of programming, aired in two-hour blocks every Sunday from April 12-May 17.

All four previous champions are in the field of 64: Phil Hellmuth (2005), Ted Forrest (2006), Paul Wasicka (2007), and Chris Ferguson (2008). The last six World Series of Poker Main Event champs will be there, too: Chris Moneymaker (2003), Greg Raymer (2004), Joe Hachem (2005), Jamie Gold (2006), Jerry Yang (2007), and Peter Eastgate (2008).

Last’s year’s World Series of Poker Europe Main Event champ, John Juanda, will also be there, but the 2007 WSOPE Main Event winner, Annette Obrestad, will not, as she still isn’t old enough to play legally in an American casino. (She’ll turn 21 this September.)

The celebrities invited include Don Cheadle, Brad Garrett, and Orel Hershiser. Jennifer Tilly and Gabe Kaplan will be there, too, although both of them have some significant poker successes to go with their celeb status.

That’s 16 of the 64. Looking through the rest of the list of those invited, one sees a number of familiar names -- that is, folks who have been there for most if not all of the previous five NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championships. People like Andy Bloch, Chad Brown, Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Allen Cunningham, Annie Duke, Sam Farha, Barry Greenstein, Gus Hansen, Jennifer Harman, Phil Ivey, Howard Lederer, Erick Lindgren, Mike Matusow, Daniel Negreanu, Scotty Nguyen, Huck Seed, Erik Seidel, Mike Sexton, Gavin Smith, and David Williams. Other unsurprising names on the list include David Benyamine, Eli Elezra, Antonio Esfandiari, Scott Fischman, Layne Flack, Clonie Gowen, Phil Laak, Vanessa Rousso, J.C. Tran, and Kenny Tran.

Of the remaining spots, four went to online qualifiers: Fred Collins, Blandino Gines, Nicholas Joy, and Leon Yanovski. And there were two more who qualified through tourneys at Caesars: Jeffrey Ishbia and Kenny Yeh. Ishbia is an attorney and recreational player, while Yeh is a cash game grinder and part-time dealer.

All of which means when most of the participants were announced a couple of weeks ago, there were really only a few names that especially piqued the interest of those of us who follow poker closely. That Ivan Demidov -- third-place finisher at the WSOPE Main Event and runner-up at the WSOP ME -- got the invite makes sense. John Phan, two-bracelet winner at last year’s WSOP and reigning Card Player player of the year, is a good choice, too. Glen Chorny, Gavin Griffin, and Dario Minieri have been invited for the first time. And Jonathan Little and David Pham are back, too. I suppose one could argue there’s a lot that is arbitrary in the selecting of folks, but all of these guys seem deserving enough.

The remaining four participants are the ones I’m most interested in watching, though. Bertrand “ElkY” Grospellier and Vanessa Selbst have both well demonstrated their poker prowess, including heads-up play. Grospellier finished runner-up at the WCOOP High Roller Heads-Up event last September, and Selbst has made it to the semifinals of the last two WSOP Heads-Up events. Both are ones to watch, I’d say. Am also interested in seeing how Ilari “Ziigmund” Sahamies, the high stakes regular and Chat Box Laureate over at Full Tilt Poker, makes out in the event.

Finally, there’s Tom Dwan. His new stardom thanks to the Challenge and the new season of High Stakes Poker might have been enough to get him back on. But his brutal ousting of Hellmuth in the first round of last year’s Heads-Up Championship probably guaranteed his return more than anything.

It was just the third hand of the match. Players started with 20,000 chips, and after two hands Dwan had just a tiny chip advantage. Hellmuth limped in (for 150) from the button/small blind with , and Dwan promptly raised to 1,100 with . Hellmuth reraised to 3,600, and Dwan took about 20 seconds or so before announcing he was all in. Hellmuth quickly called. The flop came , but the turn brought the , giving Dwan the set. Hellmuth could still make a flush (or spike an ace), but the turn was the and he was out.

Here’s the pair’s entire match, including Hellmuth’s postgame blubbering:



There has been some interesting chatter on 2+2 lately about that hand, including one thread in which Daniel Negreanu jumps in to say why he thinks Dwan made a pretty obvious misplay there against Hellmuth.

Says Negreanu, “The call with 10-10, that early in the match, against this ONE specific opponent -- was a MISTAKE. Not marginally so, but clearly, a major error because Durr was the favorite in the match the longer it went, and the 10-10 were simply NOT ahead of PH’s range in that situation. There is NO WAY PH was going to look stupid, on TELEVISION, that early in the match against a player he clearly felt he could trap with the best hand. Durr could have robbed him silly with little risk, virtually never calling a PH bet and won easily.”

Dwan went on to lose to Mike Matusow in the second round. Will be very interesting to see how Dwan approaches this year’s tourney, regardless of whom he faces. First prize is $500,000 -- not bad, but not such a plum compared to Dwan’s other ventures, it seems.

From what I understand, the structures remain poor for this tournament. Still has the potential to produce some interesting stories, though, so I’ll be following.

(EDIT [added 12 noon, 3/3/09]: For a discussion of some of those not invited to the NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship, see Shaniac’s post from today.]

Economics Is Hard

Over the weekend Vera and I attended a dinner party and had a good time socializing with several folks from different walks of life. I had perhaps met one or two of those present prior to Saturday evening, and so did a lot of introducing of myself and what I do as I met the other two dozen who were in attendance.

I’ve written before (more than once) about how the “poker side” of my existence -- the “Shamus” side -- usually doesn’t come up in these contexts. However, among this crowd Vera knew several folks and through her a couple of those were aware of my poker playing and writing. So there were a few occasions during the night when I did chat a bit about poker with people who asked.

At one point, after the desserts had been eaten and some of us were lingering around the table, one partygoer said she was tired of everyone talking constantly about the economy. She turned to me and said “Let’s talk about poker,” a kind of conscious ploy to get away from commiserating about the country’s financial woes.

However, she immediately followed that with a question about how the economic downturn was affecting poker. I answered with a two-sentence summary of the situation, noting that while many in the poker world were talking about the economy and asking the same question, people were still playing.

From there, someone brought up how he’d found a new inexpensive wine recently that really was quite good. Jokes were made about how the wine was even better after the first couple of glasses, then the conversation moved along to other examples of comparison shopping with an eye toward saving a buck.

My little summary of how the recession (as all now seem comfortable calling it) is affecting poker was inadequate, for sure, though accurate enough, I think. Certainly the situation is much different among the live games than it is online, and there are probably important distinctions to be made between high, middle, and low stakes players, too. But it is reasonable to say “people are still playing,” I think. And, if one wished to venture such predictions, it would be reasonable to add that people will always play. More or less, anyway.

By coincidence, this morning I read through Nolan Dalla’s two-part column over on PokerNews Daily titled “What the Economic Crash of 2008 Means for Poker.” Dalla, of course, is the co-author of the Stu Ungar biography One of a Kind and current Media Director for the WSOP.

For his column, Dalla asked eight people to comment on the issue, each of whom possessed different credentials that could be said to afford some specific preparation to speak to the issue intelligently. The group comprises “an attorney, a former management consultant turned author, a tax accountant, a psychologist, a high-tech consultant, a computer programmer, a college professor, a former online poker executive, and a casino industry observer.” Sort of like that party I attended, with people coming from a variety of backgrounds to gather around the table, so to speak.

The first contributor, a Washington D.C. attorney named Ken Adams, observes that “any business that depends on discretionary consumer spending is in trouble, whether it is a manufacturer or a service business.” Adams really does not address poker directly that much in his response, but you can read between the lines here. Money used to play poker is mostly (not entirely) “discretionary consumer spending” and so, I suppose, poker could be “in trouble,” generally speaking.

Interestingly (to me), he sounds a lot like the folks at my dinner party when he says a grocery store owner with whom he played poker told him people are “buying cheaper, low-profit store brands and specials rather than the premium (higher profit) brands and items.”

Other commentators address the situation faced by poker more specifically. Three others contribute to part one of Dalla’s column. Nick Christensen, reviewer of over 250 poker books and poker author himself, offers a near-term forecast for Vegas casinos. Dr. Arthur Rebar, a psychologist, actually focuses more on economics in his response, suggesting that poker won’t be as affected as, say, slots, which are generally frequented by those of a lower income, though more so than other table games played by “high rollers.” Poker pro Perry Friedman then offers a few general observations, including the idea that tourneys will suffer less than cash games.

Dan Goldman, former VP of Marketing for PokerStars, kicks off part two of the column with a guarded, so-far-so-good assessment, correctly stating that for now “traffic on the two leading online poker sites, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, seem to be unaffected.” But this situation will likely change, says Goldman. Dr. David Croson, an economist, then offers some advice to casinos trying to market to stretched-thin customers. Poker author Lou Krieger shares some anecdotes from his travels that confirm the notion that we aren’t seeing major effects yet, though may soon enough. Finally, tax expert and poker author Russ Fox focuses his comments on current legal issues and the government’s stubbornness regarding online poker.

Like the rest of our culture, the “poker economy” is many-layered, making it difficult to generalize about its overall fate. Still, it is interesting (and hard to resist) occasionally making the attempt to assign it some sort of coherent character. Kind of like when we sit at a table looking out at nine different opponents, each of whom has his or her own particular style, then try nonetheless to characterize “the game.”

I guess trying to draw such conclusions is more than just interesting -- it is necessary. But hard to do.

Seeking Sequels

I began the week going to see a sequel (George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead). Then yesterday I wrote kind of a belated sequel to a post I’d written long ago. Today I’m still in “follow up” mode, wanting to continue to discuss various items that came up during the week.

On Tuesday, I wrote a post called “A Heads Up for the WSOP (Courtesy the L.A. Poker Classic)” in which I commented on how over at the L.A. Poker Classic they had followed an interesting double-elimination format for their $10,000 buy-in heads up tournament. I noted that I thought the World Series of Poker might consider following such a format as well since doing so tends to lessen the overall effect of giving players byes, something that becomes necessary if the tourney is not capped at some exponent of two (e.g., 64, 128, 256, 512, etc.).

I heard Vivek “Psyduck” Rajkumar, winner of the LAPC heads up event, interviewed a couple of times this week (on PokerRoad Radio and the Two Plus Two Pokercast). I’d heard Rajkumar interviewed before -- a very likable, smart guy for whom it is no surprise to hear he had a lot of friends and fans pulling for him on the rail.

On one of the shows he was asked how old he is and he answered “22 and a half.” Childlike? Nerdy? Who cares? I personally am a fan of making note of the half-year.

Rajkumar’s win pushed him up over the $2 million mark in career earnings already (he won the WPT Borgata last September), so not only is he likable, he’s obviously a player. On the Two Plus Two show he explained how he made his way through the losers’ bracket at the LAPC to win the sucker, and pointed out how those over on that side had to win more matches than those who managed to stay in the winners’ bracket. That meant by the time he faced Chris Moore in the final, he’d already won nine or so matches while Moore had only had to win six to get to that point. And, of course, Rajkumar had to beat the previously-undefeated Moore twice to take the title.

Sounded like besides reducing the relative significance of byes, there were other ways the double-elimination format further tempered the luck factor -- especially welcome when the event has a $10,000 buy-in (as is the case for the WSOP heads up event this summer). Also sounded like there were some complaints at the LAPC about the unwieldy nature of the event, which took three long days to complete even though only 111 players competed. That latter problem makes me think there is little chance the WSOP will bother with trying any sort of double-elimination format (since they’ve only allotted three days for the tourney). Understandable, but lamentable.

(The pic, by the way, is from a thread on 2+2 celebrating his win -- Rajkumar has lots of friends/fans over there, for sure.)

On Wednesday, I wrote in “What Do the Numbers Show?” about one statistically improbable session of limit hold’em I had played this week. Had another highly unlikely event occur yesterday while sitting at two six-handed LHE tables ($0.50/$1.00).

I had roared out to a fast start, and in fact was up over 30 bucks within just 100 hands, thanks in large part to having had the good fortune of sitting across from some especially poor players. (The river is no time to bluff check-raise, dontcha know.)

It was right about then when I was dealt in the cutoff at one table. Then, at the other table, I received in the big blind. Just twenty seconds apart, say the hand histories.

At the first table, I open-raised and had both blinds call me. The flop came . The SB bet, the BB raised, I three-bet, and only the BB called. The turn was the , and the BB -- now down to just $1.75 -- check-raised with the last of his stack. The river was a five, and he turned over to take the nearly ten dollar pot.

Meanwhile, at the other table a late position player had raised and I reraised with my pocket rockets from the BB. He called, the flop came , I bet, and he called. The turn was a queen, and we ended up capping it. (I think I was a little agitated from losing at the other table -- not much reason to think I’m good here.) A five came on the river here, too, and I check-called my opponent’s bet. He showed pocket sixes for the flopped set, taking the $13.75 pot.

Nutty stuff. Had a bit more misfortune after that (flopping a set with pocket queens, then losing to 7-4 when he chased down a gutshot), but ended up climbing back up close to my previous high mark for the day before quitting.

February is going pretty well, all things considered. Not as well as January, but still winning. And made Silver Star on PokerStars, too, meaning I’ll have an additional cash bonus to claim once I get to 5,000 FPPs to go along with that deposit bonus I wrote about last week.

(Guinness Book of World Records fans might recognize the above picture -- that’s Roy Sullivan, the U.S. forest ranger who survived being struck by lightning seven times. Quite the occupational hazard, eh?)

Then on Thursday, I was once again “Speaking of . . . Online vs. Live.” There I was soliciting others’ thoughts regarding the different skill levels one encounters online versus live. Got a lot of very thoughtful and enlightening comments from several live game players on that one -- check ’em out.

The general consensus appeared to confirm Bart Hanson’s claim that the play at live games is much, much less tutored than what one normally runs into online, with most saying his suggested 10-to-1 ratio rang true. That is, according to Hanson, a live $5/$10 no-limit hold’em game plays about the same as a $0.50/$1.00 online NLHE game in terms of how savvy one’s competitors tend to be.

Interesting, for sure. I have a Vegas trip planned in April, during which I’ll surely try to play some. It’s hard, though, to imagine just jumping into a game the stakes for which I’m not really mentally prepared to play. When one plays live as rarely as I do, one doesn’t want to go drop a large chunk then have to live with that for several months before going back.

(The above graph from GraphJam, natch.)

Finally, while we’re on the subject of continuations, the ongoing saga of The Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show should be revived here very soon, with episode 14 just around the corner. Will give a shout here & on the show’s blog when that happens.

As they say, to be continued....

Speaking of . . . Online vs. Live (Part II)

I mentioned here before occasionally Bart Hanson’s podcast Cash Plays which ran for about a year over on PokerRoad Radio. Hanson left PRR back in December and moved his show over to the online training site Deuces Cracked, picking things back up there in mid-January.

Hanson is calling the new show “Deuce Plays” (a title which I’m not too sure about), and it follows pretty much the same format as his previous show, with Hanson having lengthy interviews with various guests. He may be primarily interviewing Deuces Cracked pros and instructors on this new show, but as was the case on PRR, the show is still focused on middle and higher stakes cash games.

(Incidentally, it appears PokerRoad will soon relaunch the Cash Plays show with a new host, Jeremiah Smith.)

As someone who plays almost zero no-limit hold’em (particularly cash games) and certainly doesn’t even come close to playing the stakes Hanson and his guests usually play, I probably shouldn’t find Hanson’s show as interesting as I do. I always somehow find the shows compelling, though, and I think I probably pick up certain tidbits that are of use now and then.

The most recent show (the 2/24/09) features poker pro and coach Tommy Angelo, author of Elements of Poker. I believe it is the first of a two-parter. Some of you might have heard Angelo on the Two Plus Two Pokercast back last August (episode 36), where he was a big hit. If you haven’t read his book or heard him before, you might check out the new show as a good introduction to some of Angelo’s ideas.

Anyhow, like I say I shouldn’t really care for Hanson’s show but I do. Case in point: A couple of weeks ago Hanson had Sean Nolan on as a guest (the 2/10/09 episode), and about 20 minutes into the show the pair were discussing the relative merits of 20-tabling $5/$10 full ring NLHE games versus playing four $25/$50 six-max. tables. What business do I, a guy who generally sticks to playing just two or three limit hold’em games at once, have listening to this debate?

Still, like I say, I’m listening. And frankly, several of the factors that Hanson and Nolan focused on in their discussion -- variance, relative skill levels of opponents, theoretical differences between short-handed and full ring play, and so forth -- are relevant to all of us, no matter what limits or games we’re playing.

One other interesting item came up on that show with Sean Nolan -- really, this was the whole reason I decided to mention Hanson’s show. At the very beginning, Hanson talked about how six months ago he was struggling a bit at the $10/$20 no-limit hold’em tables at the Commerce Casino (in Los Angeles, where the LAPC is currently winding down). In order to “retool” his game decided to move back down to the $5/$10 NLHE tables (a 150-big blind capped game), which he found “a world of difference” with less variance and, apparently, less difficult competition.

“Then I watched your videos,” he told Nolan, referring to the instructional vids Nolan had created for Deuces Cracked, “and then I put in about 80,000 hands at $0.50/$1.00 full ring (which is 100NL).” That’s when Hanson said something I found fairly provocative:

“I think that a $0.50/$1.00 game [online] is way tougher than $5/$10 no-limit [live].”

He asked Nolan for his opinion and he essentially agreed that 10-to-1 ratio sounded “about right” when comparing the relative toughness of online and live play. I recall Isaac Haxton making a similar claim on PokerRoad Radio -- I believe it was last January (the 1/5/08 show) -- where he also suggested something like a 10-to-1 ratio between the skill levels online and live.

I wrote a post a good while back concerning the whole online-vs.-live thing, so I thought I'd make this one a sequel. As someone stuck in a part of the country with no live poker, my live experience has been quite limited and thus I can’t comment with any authority on this issue at all. Additionally, there are differences between the way limit games and no-limit games are played that would likely make it problematic simply to apply the same 10-to-1 ratio over on the limit side.

But are these guys right? Is the difference in skill levels that huge? Are $0.50/$1.00 games online as tough as $5/$10 live?

What Do the Numbers Show?

If we’re going to be honest here, I’m basically more of a word guy than a numbers guy. Sometimes numbers fascinate me, though. Especially when they leave me at a loss for words.

Had a happy little session of limit hold’em over on PokerStars yesterday. Was two-tabling for about an hour and 45 minutes or so -- one full ring, one six-handed, both $0.50/$1.00. Played 249 hands and ended up $31.35. That’s an unusually high win rate (12.59 big bets/100 hands), way above the 1.5-2.0 rate I’ve been enjoying since Jan. 1 when I decided to move back over to LHE. Probably highlights a weakness of mine that I’m more apt to look over the stats after that kind of unusually good session than after a losing one.

Whatever the reason, I was doing a little post-game with PokerTracker, trying to see if some factor jumped out to offer an unequivocal explanation for the inordinately high win rate. I had won a lot of my showdowns -- 57.14% -- though not that much more than I usually do (54%). Other stats like preflop raise % and VP$IP (voluntarily put money in the pot) were basically the same, too.

I looked at my starting hands and saw I did get pocket aces three times -- and won all three. That helped considerably, no doubt. Playing just 249 hands, I should normally expect to get A-A just once (it is a 220-to-1 shot), so that was definitely a bonus.

Picked up A-K four times, about what I should expect. Of the 1,326 possible starting hands, there are 12 ways to get ace-king offsuit, and four more ways to get Big Slick suited. That means you normally get A-K about once every 82 hands or so (about 1.2% of the time). So being dealt the hand four times in 249 hands, I got it once more than averages would have suggested. But I lost twice with that hand, and was nearly six bucks down overall with it.

Kept hunting around a bit. Then -- FLASH! -- I saw it. A huge anomaly. Don’t know if it fully explained my high win rate for the session, but it definitely had its effect.

In 249 hands, I was dealt A-Q a total of 14 times. That’s right -- nearly five times as often as I should’ve expected. Got ace-queen offsuit 12 times, and suited twice.

Even crazier, I was dealt ace-queen at one of my tables -- the full ring one -- 11 times in just 112 hands. That means I was getting A-Q about once per orbit, when normally I shouldn’t expect to get it but once every eight orbits or so.

How did I do with ace-queen? Okay, I guess. I won half of the hands (7 of 14), for an overall profit of $6.90 (about half a big bet per hand). Looking at the individual hands, I notice most of the pots were small, with only a couple creeping up to four or five bucks. I raised preflop most of the time with A-Q (11 of 14 hands), though I also folded it once preflop from UTG+1 after a tight player had raised from UTG at the full ring table.

Even if I didn’t necessarily make most of my profit from A-Q, getting dealt the hand so frequently at that full ring table did have a significant effect on my image, I’m sure. My preflop raising percentage was actually higher at the full ring game than it was at the six-max. game yesterday, and while I didn’t necessarily consciously note the frequency with which I was getting ace-queen, I did pick up on the fact that the rest of the players at the table (most of whom were tight, with one notable exception) were starting to react to my relative aggression.

Ace-queen can be a frustrating hand in LHE, no doubt. Especially in full ring games. I think that explains my being relatively unfazed by getting it so often -- I wasn’t necessarily glad to see it over and over again. But I should have been. Not only was it a winning hand for me yesterday, it probably helped me win other hands, too, given the way it helped shape my image.

Am still enjoying the return to LHE after my lengthy sojourn with pot-limit Omaha. Of course, the “stories” about individual hands aren’t nearly as riveting as happens with PLO. I suppose one reason for that is the fact that LHE really is more of a “numbers game” than is PLO.

For some of us, though, the stories numbers tell can still be interesting.

Some of us (of a certain age) may also recall that vaguely suggestive picture above of the men in trench coats flashing numbers as coming from an old Sesame Street short from the 70s. Really, was that appropriate for the kiddies...?

Here is another Sesame Street short, which perhaps also helped inspire for some viewers a fascination with numbers. Or pinball. Or mind-altering chemicals....

A Heads Up for the WSOP (Courtesy the L.A. Poker Classic)

Been following the live reports and various news items emanating from the L.A. Poker Classic currently going on over at the Commerce. It’s a helluva series, lasting for six weeks and including 35 different events. As this year’s Tournament Director Matt Savage noted over on PokerRoad Radio over the weekend (the 2/21/09 episode), the LAPC is starting to rival the World Series of Poker in terms of its variety of offerings.

The series schedule included a number of non-standard events. There were eight non-hold’em events, including that $10,000 H.O.R.S.E. event won by Scotty Nguyen. The Main Event (also a $10,000 buy-in) attracted 696 entrants. They have now completed three days of play in that one, with three more days to go.

There was one other $10,000 event in the series, Event No. 32, the Heads Up Championship, won by Vivek Rajkumar. That one was originally capped at 64, with the original plan being to allow any additional entrants to play $5,000 play-in matches so as to participate. I’m not quite sure how that would have worked, but they eventually attracted a total of 111 players, and thus ended up eliminating the $5K prelim rounds.

The event was planned all along to be a double-elimination tournament, and they kept that format, somehow figuring out how to make it work for 111 players. There was a draw on Day 1 (last Wednesday) to determine the first-round matches as well as which players -- 17 in all -- would be receiving first-round byes. Once the first-round matches were complete, the winners and those who received byes then moved to the “winners’ bracket” (a total of 64 players) while the 47 losers all met up over in the “losers’ bracket.”

Since the losers’ bracket had that odd number, they had to draw again to determine who got byes. Seventeen got byes, while the other 30 played matches. The 15 losers of those matches, having lost twice, were done. That left 32 players, each with one loss apiece, over on the losers’ side. If I follow it correctly, the 32 losers from the winner’s bracket then came over to play these guys, and so on and so forth, until Chris Moore, the lone player remaining on the winners’ side, faced Rajkumar who emerged from the losers’ side. Rajkumar then had to beat Moore twice to take the title.

If you’re curious about the event and want to try to piece together the entire bracket, you can go over to the World Poker Tour page and read through B.J. Nemeth’s excellent live updates from the Heads Up event.

Have to say I very much like the use of a double-elimination format as a means to lessen the overall effect of drawing for byes. I’m remembering the fiasco at the 2007 World Series of Poker, the first time the WSOP tried a heads up tournament. 392 players signed up for that $5,000 buy-in event. If I remember correctly, officials had hoped to attract 512 and didn’t get there, and so they drew and 120 players got byes into the second round, meaning the unlucky 272 who didn’t had to play an extra match. Not too cool when you consider everyone had to pay the same entry fee for the sucker.

Last year the WSOP tried it again and this time capped it at 256 (and made it a $10,000 event), thus avoiding the issue altogether. That worked out okay, if I remember correctly, although some players who wanted to play the event got closed out, including Doyle Brunson. “Unbelievable!” wrote Brunson on his blog. “To think they would limit the number of players in a WSOP tournament. I am aware of the structure but they should change it, make another bracket, have alternatives, or something!”

The Heads Up event is part of the 2009 WSOP as well, again as a $10,000 “Championship” event (Event No. 29, to start June 13th). Structures/formats have not been announced as yet for this summer’s WSOP, but I’d think the WSOP might consider taking a cue from the LAPC and try out a double elimination format this time around.

Of course, it simply might not be feasible for the WSOP to pull off a double-elimination tourney (which would require dealing about twice as many matches) during the three days they have allotted for the event. Still, I think it is definitely an idea worth considering, if it can be managed.

Speaking of the Dead: An Afternoon with George Romero

“Do zombies ever get full?”

That was the joke question asked of George A. Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead and all of its zombie-themed sequels, by Michael Felsher, the fellow who moderated a two-hour Q&A session with the director I attended yesterday.

A nearby museum of contemporary photography and film (The Light Factory) had arranged a weekend-long tribute to Romero, with a schedule packed with events. There were screenings of half a dozen films (followed by Q&As with Romero), some sort of zombie-themed costume party on Saturday night, a couple of other sideshows, and the two-hour “One-on-One Seminar” on Sunday afternoon.

I was too busy to commit too much time to the sucker and so opted just to go to the seminar on Sunday as well as watch one of the films, Dawn of the Dead, which I’d never seen in a theater.

As any of you who have ever heard Romero speak (say on DVD commentaries or in interviews) already know, he’s not just an intelligent thinker and commentator on film and culture. He’s also a funny, extremely likable guy who has a lot of enthusiasm both for making films -- and talking about making films.

I guess like many impressionable young boys, I found the horror films of my youth fairly compelling. (I suppose that’s a phenomenon common to any generation.) So I became aware of Romero and his oeuvre early on -- films like Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Crazies (1973), Martin (1977), Dawn of the Dead, Creepshow (1982), Day of the Dead (1985), and others.

Of all of those films and directors, though, Romero is one of the few that I continued to follow and admire after becoming an adult. So when I heard he was coming, I thought I’d check him out.

Romero turned 69 earlier this month. He’s now moved to Toronto, having fully rejected the Hollywood system with which he butted heads for so much of his four-plus decade long career, and now has returned to being a fully “independent” filmmaker. He’s also fully committed himself to making more zombie films (all with “of the Dead” in the titles). A new one -- as yet untitled -- is apparently nearly finished.

“It’s my ticket to ride,” he explained of the “Dead” films. “I have this franchise,” he noted, “I can bring the zombies out of the closet.” (That line got a laugh.) But he’s hardly interested in making the same film over and again. “The movies are not about zombies anymore.... In a way, they never have been. I’m not feeling restricted in any way. I’ve been able to make movies about a lot of different things -- they just all have zombies in them.”

If you’ve never seen any of the “Dead” films, you might not be aware that what Romero is saying is true -- while all are based on the same premise of having the dead return to life to feast on the living, all are unique, too, and often concentrate on advancing different social commentaries (e.g., Night’s implicit observations about the family, the civil rights struggle, Vietnam; Dawn’s satire on consumer culture).

“I’ll make ten more,” Romero said, to the delight of the crowd. “I’ll die, come back and make another one.” (That got a big laugh, too.)

Since this is a poker blog, I won’t go on too long with all of the interesting points Romero touched on during the session regarding his various films, the commercial aspects of filmmaking, his creative process, among others. Rather, let me pull out a couple of poker-related moments that came up during the afternoon.

One came during the talk when Romero was discussing his latest film, Diary of the Dead (2007), the fifth in the series. That one focuses on a film student trying to document the crisis and the commentary there is focused largely on the media and how it aggressively shapes our ideas of ourselves.

With reference to Diary, Romero was noting how we’ve gotten to the point where the “media is not just taking over… it’s becoming life!” He alluded to virtual reality technology and research being conducted at various places, including Carnegie Mellon University in his hometown of Pittsburgh. Such research, fueled by corporate dollars, is working on creating comprehensive VR environments (virtual apartments, etc.) in which consumers can “live.”

“It’s like this f*cking gigantic Monopoly game!” Romero mused.

That analogy made me think briefly of being one of hundreds of thousands of folks logged into online poker sites playing one another. I suppose we start to resemble zombies, too, after a while.

The only other time I thought of poker yesterday was during the screeening of Dawn of the Dead. There’s a point about two-thirds of the way through the film when a couple of characters are shown playing poker. In the film, a group of four people have managed to escape the zombies momentarily to find refuge in an abandoned shopping mall. They are able to secure the mall and for a brief interlude get to enjoy a kind of Shangri-La-type existence before a gang of marauders on motorbikes arrive to screw everything up.

I actually think this is the part of the film that appeals the most to viewers, this idea of creating a self-contained, worry-free existence such as the characters in the film try to do. Of course, as Romero shows, even once you’ve managed to enclose yourself into such a world, it ain’t gonna satisfy. Not really.

Anyhow, two of the guys play poker and are tossing real hundred dollar bills back and forth, the now-worthless cash having been taken from the bank located in the mall. There were a few chuckles in the crowd, actually, at the sight of the money. In the context of the story (the apocalypse had come), the money meant nothing.

I didn’t think too long about poker then. The bikers arrived shortly afterwards, and there was their threat to focus upon. But afterwards I did consider how for most of us the money is what makes poker interesting, but how we’ll never, ever be satisfied no matter how much we get.

I guess we’re sort of like zombies that way, too. We never get full.

The Games of Life

Yesterday afternoon I found myself stuck between meetings and a bunch of other I’d-rather-be-playing-poker-but-gotta-do-this-other-crap all day and thus missed lunch altogether. Found a small window of time there in the middle of the afternoon and so ran over to the fast food chicken house not too far from where I work for a quick bite.

Grabbed a two-piece dinner and settled over in a corner of the mostly empty dining area with some reading material. After a while I noticed that besides a couple of kitchen workers taking a break over on the other side of the room, the only other people in the establishment were a collection of elderly women -- eight in all -- gathered around three tables. I glanced up briefly from my meal to make a mental guess at their ages. None seemed less than seventy, I was certain.

I went back to the food and reading, but got distracted when I realized that the women didn’t seem to be talking to one another. In fact, only one of them seemed to be saying anything, and she was doing so in a most peculiar way, following an unnatural rhythm of short statements while the others kept quiet. I looked up and saw that none were looking at each other. Strange.

When I discerned the words being spoken, I finally figured out what was going on.

“G-56.... O-72.... O-68.... B-12.... I-22....”

A small purple plastic cube was positioned on the table in front of the lady making the utterances, and between each one she depressed the yellow half-sphere on its top side. She was repeating whatever the voice emanating from cube was saying, and her colleagues were dutifully noting on cardboard cards whether or not they could find a match for the numbers called.

“Bingo,” one eventually answered. “Gotta bingo,” said the caller lady, employing the same monotone she used when calling the numbers. The lady passed her card to another woman who verified its correctness while sipping her tea through a straw.

I was there long enough to hear several games, and noticed the caller announcing different ones with words like “kite” and “two stamps,” referring to variations that require players to form something other than a straight line. For example, for “kite” you have to make a four-square box in the corner with a diagonal line going from it to the opposite corner (like a kite with a tail -- see the picture).

I thought about the ladies again later in the evening when I went for my run. Still running every day, by the way. Usually two miles. As I motored over the sidewalks, I contemplated that Thursday afternoon bingo game, considering what it probably meant to the women who played it.

Am reasonably sure they weren’t playing for money, although they could have been. No, it seemed like it was mostly just for fun. And to be together. The group’s average age suggested it could very well be the case that most or all had outlived their husbands, if they’d had ’em. In any case, it was easy to see getting together like that -- being with others, and having some activity to provide an occasion for the get-together -- was important stuff. The most important stuff.

As I ran, last week’s episode of “Keep Flopping Aces” came to mind as well (the 2/12/09 show). Host Lou Krieger had Ashley Adams on to talk about the many, many poker rooms the latter has visited in his extensive travels. An interesting hour.

About halfway through the show, they got into discussing various promotions some rooms offer, and Adams brought up Joker’s Wild in Henderson, Nevada as a not-so-great room for atmosphere, but a terrific one for its promotion. As Adams outlines in his recent review of the room over on PokerNews, regulars can get a whopping $599 bonus a month for playing 130 hours. That discussion led Krieger to point out the preponderance of senior citizens regularly playing low limit games who could benefit greatly from such a bonus.

“Certainly, there are so many people in Las Vegas that are retired and on fixed incomes and they’re not getting wealthy,” said Krieger. “They sit in these low limit poker games, day in and day out, hour after hour after hour, trying to supplement their pensions by a couple of bucks an hour and waiting for a tourist or some terrible player to come into the game and spew money around.”

Picking up an extra few bucks an hour could help out a lot for such folks, Krieger concluded. Adams agreed. “It’s not the kind of existence that I’d want or you’d want,” said Adams. “But, hey? If you’re retired and you’re already just sitting around in some other poker room gathering dust, waiting for the bad beat to hit while you’re in there so you can get a fraction of the jackpot, it’s not a bad gig.”

The chicken house bingo ladies reminded me that for many in this crowd there’s another bonus to be had, too -- the non-monetary one that comes from getting out regularly, interacting with others, and being part of the world. That general effort not to be “gathering dust,” one might say.

I suppose I understand what is meant by the idea that such an existence is not necessarily preferable. But really, how different is it from the ones we already lead? What is it we are all running around trying to accomplish? To find something interesting to do, to have fun, to endure. And finding others to do these things with, well, that’s a big part of what’s going on, too. Maybe we’re sometimes playing against each other, but we need each other to have a game at all.

Have a good weekend, friends.