Plots and Percentages

Am slipping into spectator mode today.

Have currently dialed up the streaming coverage of the final table of the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure Main Event final table on pokerstars.tv. Will probably look in on the coverage there tomorrow as well when they show the finale of the High Roller, the $25,500 buy-in event that ended up drawing a huge field of 148.

Am remembering how last year the PCA kind of inaugurated the whole “almost live” programming that by year’s end became something of the norm thanks to its employment at both the World Series of Poker Main Event (online and on television) and a few World Poker Tour final tables (online).

Last year the PCA managed to grab several hours of air time on ESPN2 to show Galen Hall’s come-from-behind Main Event win over Chris Oliver. Was entertaining stuff, and I’m similarly enjoying the start of today’s final table, being shown on a 40-minute delay with commentary by James Hartigan and Joe Stapleton.

And, of course, I’ll remain in spectator mode this weekend as I will surely look in on those NFL playoff games, all four of which are pretty darned intriguing. Was especially locked in when it came to pro football this year, especially during the last few weeks as I battled to win that there pick’em pool run by the good Dr. Pauly. (Discussed that some here.)

For the entire regular season, I was picking games each week. Until December or so, I would confine my study of the week’s games to Sunday mornings. Then, as we approached the end of the year, I couldn’t help but think about the match-ups a day or two earlier, reading some online and trying to gather a little extra info to help me make my picks.

I’m kind of fascinated by the full-time sports bettors who spend countless hours crunching numbers, finding the best spots, and seeking enough of an edge to beat the vig on a consistent basis. And I’ve always been kind of a numbers-geek, instinctively intrigued by sports’ seemingly endless statistics. But I don’t think I could ever become that immersed in the numbers side of things. Besides, I like the stories -- the plots and characters -- sports can produce too much.

I’ve thought about this before, and probably written about it, too -- I believe it is that combination of stories and puzzles, of literature and logic, that has made poker such a fun, gratifying pursuit for me.

Speaking of sports producing interesting plots and characters, I took a shot at talking about the whole Tim Tebow phenomenon over on Betfair poker today, specifically considering how he’s begun to attract interest of non-football folks and comparing that phenomenon to poker’s ongoing struggle to capture the attention of those outside its niche audience of hardcore fans. Here’s that article, if you’re curious.

While you do that, I’m going to go retake my seat among the niche audience of hardcore fans watching the PCA final table this afternoon.

The Hangover’s Game of Chicken

Well behind the crowd, Vera Valmore and I finally got around to watching The Hangover this week. Kind of surprising we hadn’t caught it yet, given how we both generally like these over-the-top kinds of comedies. Indeed, a lot of time when we make it to the theater it is to kick back and enjoy something like The Hangover rather than to be challenged too greatly by more intellectually-demanding fare.

That said, The Hangover is a fairly clever film, particularly in its unusual plotting whereby the story moves ahead yet also looks back pretty much throughout. As those of you who’ve seen it know -- and even those who haven’t probably do, too -- the main characters’ bachelor party turns into a night of mayhem that none can remember afterwards, and so the final two-thirds of film involves them trying to piece together what happened during those hours they all blacked out.

Lots of grins throughout, and the Las Vegas setting made it more fun given the amount of time we’ve both spent in Sin City over the last few years. The “wolfpack” speech by Alan (Zach Galifianakis) was a definite highlight, as was the tiger song performed by Stu (Ed Helms).

Something friends of ours had drawn our attention to before viewing was the apparent non sequitur of the chicken. While all of the story’s considerable complications seem reasonably resolved by The Hangover’s conclusion, no real explanation ever comes for the fact that when the fellas wake up in their Caesars Palace suite following their wild night there’s a chicken conspicuously present.

Even stranger, the guys never seem concerned to figure out why the chicken is there, instead content just to stumble over it repeatedly while they work on other puzzles. Of course, they might be forgiven by the fact that there are a number of other issues that seem more urgent, including the additional presence of a tiger and a baby in the suite, as well as the absence of their friend, the groom-to-be.

Vera and I talked about the chicken some afterwards, and I floated the idea that rather than representing a “mistake” in the plotting, its presence actually served to reinforce the idea that the rest of the film’s many loose ends had been tied. Not so much a MacGuffin -- i.e., a plot element that is also ambiguous but more integral to driving the action -- but really just a superfluous, non-integrated detail that reminds us how just about every other detail has significance. Just part of the overall game of concentration being played with the audience.

That response might be a little on the high-falutin’ side, but you get the point. It makes me think of how in poker some value can be created by making a non-characteristic or erratic-seeming play early in a session. Say you call a raise from out of position with a lousy hand, perhaps even give up another bet by the river, then showdown your trash as your opponent wins a small pot. Everyone pegs you as a noob with little understanding of hand values or the importance of position, then pay you off repeatedly when you subsequently play your usual solid game.

Of course, there we might say the poorly-played hand isn’t really like the chicken, because it is in fact integrated into the “plot” you’re creating during the early part or “exposition” of your session. Even so, it is similar insofar as the “failure” represented by the poorly-played hand helps make the “success” of the rest of your session seem that much more impressive. (And perhaps even more profitable.)

Pulling off such a move can be easier said than done, though. It is hard to play a hand badly deliberately. In fact, I’d suggest that usually when this sort of scenario develops it is because we’ve genuinely screwed up a hand early on, then settled down afterwards.

Anyhow, to get back to The Hangover, I admit I may be giving more attention to the silly chicken than is warranted. Although a bit of searching online reveals a lot of theories -- some considerably more abstract and involved than this one -- regarding it.

If I am going overboard here though, well, that’s okay. I’ll just have to be a one-man wolfpack on this one.

A. Alvarez and America

I’ve written here many times about the English writer Al Alvarez, in particular regarding his 1983 book The Biggest Game in Town. Just click that “Al Alvarez” tag at the bottom of this post to see a number of examples.

In fact, last spring I wrote a half-dozen posts that focusing on a single chapter of The Biggest Game in Town, a kind of extended close reading intended to highlight some of the book’s themes as well as to demonstrate how packed full of great stories and ideas the book is. (Those posts begin here.)

Alvarez is not just a “poker writer,” of course, having had a lengthy career writing poetry, literary criticism, and other nonfiction on a host of different topics. However, his contributions to our little subgenre of nonfiction or sports journalism or whatever you want to call it are especially noteworthy. Inspiring, even.

In The Biggest Game in Town, Alvarez reports from the 1981 World Series of Poker (won by Stu Ungar), ultimately providing an especially insightful, thorough portrait not just of the WSOP and Vegas but American culture as a whole and poker’s significant status within it.

Years later Alvarez penned a second book about poker titled Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats (first published in 2001). At first glance that book’s extensive (and very cool) collection of illustrations and photographs might cause one to consider it a “coffee table book,” but it, too, includes a number of smart, entertaining, and revealing discussions about our favorite card game. The book provides a nice supplement to The Biggest Game in Town, exploring various facets of the game and culminating with a chapter recounting Alvarez’ own participation in the 1994 WSOP Main Event.

Like The Biggest Game in Town, the more recent book also finds Alvarez making some astute observations about American culture and the many ways poker reflects it, especially in the first chapter, titled “The American Game.”

For my “Community Cards” column this week on the Epic Poker blog, I shared some of what Alvarez talks about in that first chapter of Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats as well as in the initial chapter of The Biggest Game in Town. Obviously there was a lot more to be said about the two books and Alvarez’ significant contributions to poker writing, but in the column I mainly focused on some of the Londoner’s observations about poker and American culture.

Check out the column for more, and as I say at the end, if you aren’t familiar with Alvarez’ poker writings, you could do a lot worse than to pick up The Biggest Game in Town, Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats, or both.

Breaking Records in the Bahamas

Been following reports from the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure over the last few days, including the news of Viktor “Isildur1” Blom’s triumph in the $100K Super High Roller over the weekend.

Sort of a neat reprise of that revelation at the PCA almost exactly one year before when Blom finally confirmed once and for all what everyone already knew, namely, that he was in fact the Swingin’ Swede of online legend.

Blom won $1,254,400 for besting the field of 30 at the Super High Roller, his best live score by a long, long shot. When I saw that first prize, I couldn’t help but think back to that hand of $500/$1,000 pot-limit Omaha Blom lost to Patrik Antonius a little over two years ago on Full Tilt Poker, the one for which the pot totaled a mind-boggling $1,356,946.50.

Remember that? I suppose that still stands as a record as far as online poker goes.

Speaking of records, I was also kind of diverted on Sunday by the exploits of Randy “nanonoko” Lew at the PCA. Lew spent the day sitting at a computer, a couple of large monitors glowing before him, attempting to set a record for most hands of poker played during an eight-hour period while still turning a profit. (That is Lew pictured above, as photographed by the great Joe Giron.)

I’m not really sure what the previous record was supposed to be here, but in any case Lew did manage to establish a new standard by playing 23,493 hands and concluding with a small but significant profit of $7.93. That broke down to a shade under 49 hands per minute, if you can imagine that.

I believe he was moving back and forth between low limits and $5/$10 no-limit hold’em throughout the day. According to Brad “Otis” Willis’ report on the PokerStars blog, Lew was actually down as much as $1,200 at one point before grinding his way back into the black. And thus into the record books.

I’d have to go back through my own personal record books to see for certain, but I imagine the most hands I ever played in a single session was probably around 1,500 or so, and that probably took eight hours or thereabouts. I never got much beyond three-tabling, really, a far cry from the 40-ish tables Lew generally had going throughout the day.

In fact, after the first couple of years playing online, I gravitated towards shorter sessions (a hour or two) and one- or two-tabling, both because I tended to win more consistently playing that way and I found myself becoming less and less desirous to sit and play for long stretches.

As far as my biggest-ever pot goes, I remember losing a hand of PLO50 once that had ballooned up around $400 or so, half of which I had contributed. Straight flush over my aces full. Exquisite pain, that. Won a few big pots, too, but nothing that high. You know, just $1.356 million or so off the record.

Now, of course, I am strictly playing for nickels and dimes, nursing my two smallish rolls on Carbon and Hero, both earned in freerolls. And usually no more than a half-hour or hour at most. Looking back, I see I had a 300-plus hand session back in November, easily the longest I’ve played over the last half-year or so.

Blom is still just 21 years old. I believe Lew is 26. I guess it is safe to say both probably view money a little differently than do most of us. And time. And the relationship between the two.

Oh, and they both gots some skills, too.

The Hunger Games and Poker Tournaments

I did finish The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins the other day, my first Kindle book.

The novel was published in 2008 and is the first of a trilogy set in a kind of post-apocalyptic America (redubbed “Panem”) in which 12 “districts” are ruled by a totalitarian government (the “Capitol”). Little back story comes in this first book, so the reader just has to accept the premise in which Panem’s citizens must suffer unfair treatment from the Capitol, including an annual ritual in which two citizens from each district (one boy and one girl, aged 12-18) are made to fight in the brutal “hunger games” from which only one of the 24 participants can survive.

The book is told in the first person by the 16-year-old Katniss, the girl from District 12 who must fight in the games. The book and trilogy have been marketed as “young adult” fiction, and as I read I could tell I probably would’ve enjoyed it much more as a teen. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, a film adaptation is due soon (in March, I think), a lot of which was filmed in North Carolina last summer. Depending on the budget, I’m guessing the movie will be a CGI-laden action pic with a lot of good-looking young actors, and will probably be a hit.

The story kind of plays off “Survivor” and other competition-based “reality” shows which feature an ensemble of players whom an audience follows for a few weeks until one emerges as the winner. The “hunger games” take place in an elaborate, controlled “arena” and are televised throughout Panem, and it seems like they become a kind of national focus as they play out. Kind of like the NFL playoffs or “American Idol” or the presidential campaign or... (fill in the blank).

As I said in that earlier post, the lottery at the beginning of the book which determines who must fight in the games is pretty directly lifted from that famous Shirley Jackson short story from the 1940s. And while it has been many years since I’ve read Stephen King’s early novel The Long Walk (published in 1979 as by Richard Bachman), the story seems very similar to that one, too. Also reminds me of those Japanese Battle Royale movies more than a little.

I was also reminded as I read of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago) as well as her two Parable novels, which also featured young female protagonists fighting for survival amid creatively-constructed, alternate worlds. Butler’s books also provide a lot more depth in their exploration of similar themes, including violence, sexuality, self-identity, family and relationships, and more. (I’d definitely recommend Butler before The Hunger Games.)

Anyhow, I’m bringing up The Hunger Games again here because I wanted to point out how the story reminded me in several ways of a multi-table poker tournament such as the World Series of Poker Main Event. I’ll try to list a few here without giving away too much plot.

There are constant references in the book to the “Gamemakers” who might be likened to tournament officials and/or the director governing game play. As in a poker tournament, the rules for the hunger games are significant, although the possibility for the Gamemakers in Collins’ novel to change the rules or introduce new ones as they go is a bit greater than is the case at the WSOP.

Like happens with the WSOP, non-players bet on the outcome according to constantly shifting odds. And as mentioned, viewers can follow all of the action at home. Once the field shrinks to less than a dozen, Katniss mentions how “they’ll be doing special features on each of us” for the viewing audience.

While the hunger games are literally life-and-death for the characters, they seem mostly about creating a spectacle and retaining an audience. “From the Gamemakers’ point of view, this is the final word in entertainment,” explains Katniss at one point. There’s even a highlight show at the end, again reminding me of the way the WSOP Main Event has often been presented. “Condensing several weeks into three hours is quite a feat,” observes Katniss.

Players collude with one another in the hunger games (something that is allowed more openly than in a poker tournament), their “alliances” sometimes recalling the online sponsorships that identify certain players as belonging to the same “pack.” And speaking of sponsorships, the players in the hunger games are also sponsored, with gifts provided to them as they fight (medicine, food, etc.) which could be said to create an unfair advantage for some.

There’s some profiling of opponents and “reading” of other players in The Hunger Games. Katniss enters the games with a healthy respect for others’ abilities. However, at one point she notes “I’ve spent so much time making sure I don’t underestimate my opponents that I’ve forgotten it’s just as dangerous to overestimate them as well.”

Indeed, while she seems a relatively well-prepared or “skilled” player, she knows that the reckless play of others can get her in trouble, noting early on that “stupid people are dangerous.”

Game play recalls poker strategy in other instances, too, with bluffing, trap-setting, slow-playing, and many other examples reflecting the psychological warfare of a poker tournament. At one point Katniss refers to “the surreal world of the arena where the authenticity of everything is to be doubted.”

By the way, it is in the context of such strategy talk that the book’s only sorta-kinda-reference to poker arises, when Peeta (the boy selected from District 12) tells Katniss she isn’t a good bluffer. “Never gamble at cards,” he says. “You’ll lose your last coin.”

There are a few other analogies with poker tourneys and especially the WSOP ME I could draw, including the handsome, set-for-life reward due the winner. I’ll stop here, though, as it would be hard to explain further without dropping a few spoilers.

While I can’t really say I was moved too terribly much by the book -- I don’t think I’m going to continue with the rest of the trilogy -- it was entertaining. And it might well appeal to poker players, especially those who play tourneys and thus perhaps might be inclined to like this sort of winner-take-all story.

New Jersey to Join the Online Gambling Race?

I remember arriving in Atlantic City last spring to help cover the WSOP-Circuit event there. Just a few days before I got there, New Jersey governor Chris Christie had vetoed a bill that would have allowed for instrastate online gambling via websites run by AC casinos, and there was still a bit of buzz going around about the news.

Had the bill made it past Christie’s desk, New Jersey would have been the first state to pass such a bill. As it happened, Nevada would gain that distinction a few months later when it passed A.B. 258.

At the time, Christie had said he had “significant concerns” with the proposed bill, including uncertainty about whether it satisfied certain requirements in the state’s constitution. Christie also noted at the time that many New Jersey residents were in fact opposed to the state offering online gambling -- polls then indicated they were about 2-to-1 against -- and thus wasn’t sure if the bill reflected “the public’s sentiment.”

There were no references to federal laws in the message accompanying Christie’s veto. That is to say, he mentioned nothing then about the Wire Act, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, or other federal laws that might have raised concern for a state wishing to pass a bill such as the one he’d chosen to veto.

There was talk even then about the value of getting out ahead of this issue -- i.e., for New Jersey to be first in line when it came to passing such legislation and thus getting the infrastructure together to start offering online gambling before other states could. But Christie weighed the risk against the potential reward and decided folding the better option.

Cut to the first week of 2012. As the previous year was coming to a close, a revised opinion from the Department of Justice regarding the Wire Act and its applicability to non-sports betting was made public, seemingly removing a possible obstacle to states setting up their own online gambling sites.

Nevada, having passed its online gambling bill six months before, has approved regulations for licensing companies to offer online gambling, and many have already applied. Approvals of those applications are expected to come in April.

And now, after playing it safe for several months, New Jersey appears ready to play.

State senator Raymond Lesniak had reintroduced the a new version of the bill in August with revisions responding to some of Christie's concerns about it opening the door for more than just AC casino-run websites. As the new year began, Lesniak again attempted to get the bill (S-3019) considered before the current legislative session ends next Monday, although it doesn’t appear that is going to happen.

However, it does look like the bill could well come up for a vote and could possibly be passed during the first part of the next session (i.e., within a couple of weeks). This week Lesniak met with the governor and came away confident that Christie is likely on board with the new bill. “I expect that we can get it through the Legislature and signed by the Governor within the first few weeks of the new session,” said Lesniak in a statement issued on Wednesday.

I haven’t examined the previous New Jersey bill (that Christie vetoed), nor the revised one that sounds like it may pass, so I don’t know the specifics of how it was changed to assuage the governor’s concerns. In any case, it seems clear that the DOJ’s new stance has ignited something here, even if Christie hadn’t mentioned anything about federal laws regarding online gambling last spring when vetoing the earlier bill.

Meanwhile, several other states are starting to talk in similarly serious ways about offering online gambling in the wake of that revised DOJ opinion. As Mike Sexton would say, it looks like we have ourselves a race situation, Vince.

Novel Thinking

Like I imagine most folks who trip over here from time to time to read these poker-related scribblings, I usually spend a bit of time each day perusing various poker news sites, forums, and following the chatter on Twitter in an effort to keep track with what’s happening in the poker world.

As I’m sure you also notice when making such a virtual trek around the intertubes, there’s a lot of repeating of information happening online. Such is the case not just for poker but for just about any subject area. It’s as though as soon as something newsworthy happens or gets reported, dozens are sharing the exact same news within a short span of time, thus helping any item -- even examples of misreporting -- quickly proliferate around our little circle.

I remember once having a writing teacher explain to me the concept of “common knowledge.” In academic essays, one generally is required to document one’s sources whenever presenting ideas or words that are not one’s own. The one exception to this rule was the occasion of presenting so-called “common knowledge.” You know, like the Titanic went down in 1912 or John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

The teacher offered a rule of thumb for determining whether or not an idea or bit of information qualified as “common knowledge.” If you see the information in five different sources, the teacher explained, only then can you safely assume it is common knowledge and thus not in need of citation.

Back then we didn’t have the internet to assist us with our research. So finding something in five different sources meant putting in a lot of time amid the stacks in the library. Indeed, I sometimes thought the five-source minimum was intentionally established as a difficult-to-reach barrier so as to keep students from being too quick to think of something as “common knowledge” and thus more apt to cite sources whenever in doubt.

Today, of course, such advice is mostly meaningless. Moments after I publish this post, you’ll probably be able to find the words I am writing appear in five different other places, having been “scraped” and published by various web-page producing programs. It is almost as though everything that gets published somewhere online instantly becomes “common knowledge” and is regarded as such by many going forward -- i.e., as fair game for reporting without attribution.

Maybe it’s because I have occasionally been called on to write poker news articles myself that I find myself thinking about this phenomenon. Or because I write this blog every weekday, where I always try to avoid repeating what else is out there and provide something novel or at least a little bit different, even if it is only just to share a personal take on what everyone else is talking about.

Thanks in part to the way search engines work and the whole “SEO” thing, a distinction has developed in internet reporting between publishing something that is “new” and publishing something that is “original.” The fact is, it is much more valued to be first -- or perceived as first by the elusive algorithms employed by internet search engines -- than it is to be original. (I smile grimly at the post I wrote yesterday, today appearing on other sites as though published years ago.)

Writing and publishing original content is by definition going to mean producing something that is new. Readers will recognize this, but so will the search engines (which will help attract more readers).

But it is possible also to appear to write something new without necessarily writing something that is original. A quick summary of someone else’s reporting can accomplish as much quite efficiently, and depending on the site producing it, can effectively place a newly-published page way up or even at the top of searches for the item.

And speaking of efficiency, it is much less costly to come up with such “new” (but not original) content than it is to commission that which is truly original.

I’m conscious of the fact that my observation here is itself unoriginal. I nonetheless felt compelled to bring up the idea here as I’ve been lately seeing not just the usual examples of the phenomenon but also some others pointing out having seen the same, too.

Perhaps it was because of thinking about all of this -- coupled with a further bit of meditating on “viral” videos and marketing, cut-and-paste emails, “retweeting” on Twitter, etc. -- that I have come up with the first inklings of an idea for a new novel.

It may turn out to be a science fiction story, though the variety of sci-fi that serves to provide a commentary on the “real” world we inhabit. Perhaps even an original one.

Gonna file the idea away for now, though. I have another novel I need to finish first. Besides, I don’t want to get to carried away with explaining the idea here today only to see it a hundred times over elsewhere before I even begin writing.

A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)

Wanted today to point everyone to a new “Community Cards” column over on the Epic Poker blog, this one about a 1912 silent film titled A Cure for Pokeritis. Has to be just about the oldest poker movie ever made, I would guess.

The 12-minute movie was recently chosen by the National Film Registry for preservation. Each year a fellow named James H. Billington, a Librarian of Congress, selects 25 films from a list compiled by the National Film Preservation Board and the general public.

The idea is to pick movies that are of “enduring significance to American culture.” In other words, one might regard the list as kind of like a time capsule in which all sorts of examples of cinematic storytelling are being kept, all indicating various ideas or themes or values thought to be representative or important to the U.S.

The list started in 1989, so now there are 575 films total on the list. Most of the titles are familiar insofar as they are films that were very popular or critically acclaimed or both. But there are a number of fairly obscure ones there, including some non-commercial fare.

Here’s the full list, if you’re curious. Would probably be fun to go through and watch them all. You’ll see that along with A Cure for Pokeritis this year’s list included Bambi, The Big Heat, The Silence of the Lambs, Porgy and Bess, War of the Worlds (the original), Forrest Gump, and a one-minute film from 1972 called A Computer Animated Hand.

According to the little blurb about A Cure for Pokeritis that came along with the announcements of this latest round of choices, the film was picked primarily because it stars John Bunny, one of cinema’s first comic stars. That’s him on the right, having to borrow money from a friend for the fare home after losing all he had at the tables.

But in my “Community Cards” column I speculated a bit about how its inclusion also could be said to help preserve something of the significance of poker to the U.S.

The column includes two YouTube clips which deliver the entire film. So if you’re curious about this disease “pokeritis” and how it can be cured, go check it out.

On Occupy PokerStars and Other Protests

Have been somewhat intrigued by all the hubbub surrounding PokerStars’ change to a weighted-contributed model of attributing rake instituted on January 1. The ones griping about the change have made the most noise, it seems. Meanwhile, those with less of an issue with it have been relatively less conspicuous, though perhaps more persuasive.

I’m one of those recreational players who despite playing a lot of online poker never really got heavily into taking advantage of things like rakeback or other promotions sites offer to reward high frequency players. While PokerStars didn’t offer rakeback, anyway, its “VIP Stellar Rewards” program was a way for even small-timers like me to earn a few bonuses along the way. So I became somewhat familiar with it until last April when I had to leave the site with the rest of the Americans.

I played a lot more on PokerStars than Full Tilt Poker over the years, preferring the site for a variety of reasons. So I ultimately earned a lot more extras on Stars than I did on Tilt, including numerous cash bonuses. I think the only extra I ever got from FTP was to purchase an international power converter with my FTP points once. Meanwhile, I never did figure out FTP’s “Black Card” program or “Iron Man” program or any of the rest.

All of which is to say, I’d never really given a ton of thought to how rake was attributed on the various sites. I knew that my Frequent Player Points (FPPs) on Stars were awarded based on how much rake was taken from pots, but it really wasn’t until last year -- after closing my account on Stars -- that I became aware of different ways to attribute rake and thus award FPPs or the equivalent.

Since I write some for Betfair Poker, I’ve gotten to know a little bit about its poker site (even though I cannot play on it) which joined the Ongame network back in 2010. There they have something called “Ongame Essence” which is some sort of algorithm that factors playing style and amounts won or lost when calculating the attribution of rake.

“Essence” is an appropriately mysterious-sounding name for it, I think, because it is hard for players to know how many points they are earning as they play. If I understand it correctly, the model boils down to keeping the less profitable players in the game, essentially (pun intended).

I’ve read forum threads where some have objected to the fairness of giving losing players extra benefits to retain them this way. I’ve also seen the whole program characterized as “poker socialism.” But others have noted how they’ve found a lot of poor players populating the tables on Ongame sites, suggesting the model might well be indirectly benefiting good players, too.

In any case, learning about Ongame Essence made me more aware of different ways to attribute rake and award loyalty points. It’s an issue fairly unique to the online game, really, something that can be experimented with much more easily there than in live poker where comps are generally given for the amount of time one plays (e.g., $1 or $2 per hour) rather than how much rake has been taken at the games.

By changing to a weighted-contributed model of rake attribution, Stars moved away from the so-called “dealt method” which awarded every player at the table similarly regardless of their involvement in a hand. In other words, whereas before all players at a table would get credited with the same amount of VPPs for hands into which they were dealt, now only those players who actually put money into the pot -- and thus contribute to the rake taken out -- can earn any VPPs.

In other words, you can’t really earn a lot of VPPs (which get translated into FPPs according to your status on Stars, e.g., Bronze, Silver, Gold on up to SuperNova and SuperNova Elite) if you fold the majority of your hands. Thus does the change appear to some to resemble the Essence program insofar as it gives the looser players (who tend to be less skilled) more VPPs while the tighter players (who tend to be better) receive less.

There are other objections being raised, including the fact that the change will likely mean PokerStars will be awarding less FPPs overall due to the fact that fewer players will be able to achieve higher statuses (where they get more FPPs for VPPs). A common cry, then, is that the change hurts regulars/good players a lot, helps recreational/poor players a little, with the site pocketing the difference.

The complaints reached a kind of fever pitch on the forums last week, making it seem like Stars’ decision fell into the same category as the Netflix-Qwikster debacle from September, Bank of America’s new debit card fee in October, and Verizon’s attempt last week to add a fee when customers paid their bills online.

All three of those changes were swiftly reconsidered in response to customer backlash. Back in August, PartyPoker saw similar complaints arise when they changed their rake structure and also decided to go with a weighted-contributed model for rake attribution. Players protested by staging a mass “sit-out” on the site -- logging in, sitting at tables, then not playing -- and Party backed off the rake hike although did keep on with the weighted-contribution model.

Perhaps inspired by all of these other successful protests, there was an attempt by some regulars to stage their own “sit-out” on PokerStars on New Year’s Day. But the site quashed that quickly by clearing tables and locking the accounts of those trying to pull an “Occupy PokerStars.” Read more about that on PokerFuse.

“im guessing this sit out shizznit didnt go well?” asked one poster in the 2+2 thread devoted to the sit-out. “thats the general consensus,” was another’s response.

As I say, the cries of dissent have been loud, but some -- including Phil Galfond and a few other respected voices in the poker community -- are noting that the complaints aren’t necessarily warranted. Others -- including Kim of Infinite Edge -- have pointed out that Stars is in fact behind the curve a little when it comes to moving away from the dealt method of rake attribution, with only a few sites still operating that way. (Incidentally, Full Tilt had switched from the “dealt” method to the weighted-contributed model for rake attribution just prior to shutting down.)

If I were still playing on Stars, I probably would’ve have been affected a small amount by the change, likely earning FPPs at a slightly lower clip than before. But as I mentioned I doubt it would’ve mattered that much to me, given that I never put in enough volume for the loyalty bonuses to matter too greatly.

So I probably wouldn’t have been too bothered by it all were I still playing on the site. And while its hard to be certain from the rail like this, I’m less persuaded by the protestors than I am by those pointing out the change isn’t as worthy of criticism as some believe.

Page 2 of 366; or, Following the Crowd

Saw this odd-looking item among the trending topics on Twitter this morning. Took me a while to figure out what it meant. And once I did I decided to go along with the crowd and name today’s post after it. Because, well, the post is sort of about just that -- following others.

It’s a new year. Spent the first day of 2012 intently concentrating on those NFL games yesterday, for a couple of reasons.

One was because I’m a football fan and there were a ton of meaningful games, all piled onto the same day as each of the 32 teams finished out their regular seasons. The NFL does a smart thing with their schedule, having all 16 of these final games being within the division, thereby increasing the likelihood that they’d have some impact on playoffs. And as often happens there were a lot of fantastic finishes all day that further amped up the excitement.

The other reason I was so focused on football was this pool I’ve mentioned off and on here, the Pauly’s Pub one in which we pick all the games all year. No spreads to worry about, but still a not insignificant challenge each week to guess winners.

I’d been hovering near the top of the leaderboard since mid-season and entered yesterday tied for first, meaning I had a shot at winning the whole shebang. So I fretted all week over the games, deciding that this final week of the season was probably the hardest to handicap given all the different factors in play regarding injuries, playoff seedings, and teams’ relative need to win.

I was conscious of one other factor, too, something I’d been thinking about pretty much every week since I’d found myself either leading or tied for the lead in the pool -- namely, what picks others were making.

There had been a number of games over the last few weeks where I had picked a team not necessarily because I thought that team would win, but because I knew everyone else near the lead was going to pick that team as well. It might sound odd, consciously not picking a team I actually thought would win. Hell, it is odd. But by not going against the crowd and picking an underdog I could just about assure myself that the game wouldn’t affect the standings no matter how it turned out, which in several such cases was the option I took.

To give one example, a week ago the Houston Texans were at the Indianapolis Colts on Thursday night. Houston had already locked up its playoff spot and was coming off a bad outing at home in which they were beaten by the Carolina Panthers, while Indy had just avoided a winless season the week before by beating Tennessee. Was one of those games where even though Houston was a decent-sized favorite -- by 5 or 6 points, I think -- there were a few reasons why Indy actually seemed like the right pick.

I remember hearing some pundits say as much that day, including Michael Wilbon making a convincing case on “Pardon the Interruption” a couple of hours prior to kickoff for why Indy would win the game. But I took Houston anyway, and as expected the entire top half of the pool’s leaderboard did the same. We took the game out of play, essentially. And when the Colts won we all thought a moment about what might have been, then moved on to consider the weekend’s games.

In poker we sometimes talk about “game theory” entering into certain decisions, although most of the time a lot of us aren’t altogether clear on what exactly game theory is. I’m not going to pretend to understand all of the ins and outs of game theory, but I do get how it involves making decisions based on what we think our opponents have chosen to do.

I can see how game theory perhaps could be said to have come into play occasionally in the pool. Especially in a situation like this, where all of us at the top of the leaderboard faced having to pick that Houston-Indy game and thus found ourselves in a spot kind of like that represented by the prisoner’s dilemma, that classic example often used to illustrate game theory.

In that example, two prisoners are suspected of a crime. Each has an opportunity either to turn the other in or remain silent. If one turns the other in and the other remains silent, the one who did the turning in goes free while the other receives a maximum sentence, say a year. If both turn each other in, both get a lesser sentence, say three months. If both remain silent, both will serve even less time in jail, say one month.

To translate the example into “Pigskin Pick’em” terms, picking Indy would have been like remaining silent here, but we were all worried about everyone else “betraying” us and picking Houston. In other words, the fact that we were sure everyone else was going to pick Houston made picking Indy seem more risky than it would have been otherwise.

So we all took Houston, thus guaranteeing the game wouldn’t matter in terms of our relative standing in the pool. We avoided the longer sentence (i.e., the risk represented by going it alone and possibly dropping a game to everyone else), but took the lesser one (i.e., picking as we assumed everyone else would and accepting that the game wouldn’t help us, but wouldn’t hurt us, either).

As one tied for the lead, I liked inching one game closer to season’s end like this without having to worry about the possibility of losing my lead. But I knew once we got to the final week it might not be such a simple thing to continue to play this way -- to try to pick games the same way I thought my closest challengers were picking -- unless I had somehow built a big enough lead and was reasonably sure I could predict my opponents’ picks with accuracy.

But neither was the case. As I mentioned above, I made it to the final week tied for first with another player, Johnnie Walker, with Dawn Summers just one game back in third. And it didn’t take me long when looking over yesterday’s schedule to realize we were probably going to go in a lot of different directions on these final games. There really were only a couple of “obvious” picks out of the 16 -- e.g., there was little doubt that Atlanta was gonna crush Tampa Bay, Philly was probably gonna whip the Redskins, etc. However, while there were some favorites here and there among the other games, most were genuine toss-ups where it wasn’t really possible to predict which way the others were going to go.

So, unlike the last several weeks, I picked all 16 this time without giving a single thought to what others were doing. And as it happened I did well with my picks, getting lucky in a few cases -- as I have all year -- and hitting 14 of them to take the sucker down. (The two I missed were picking Detroit to beat Green Bay and Oakland to beat San Diego.)

Like I say, I only have a general understanding of game theory, and realize I might be applying it a little too loosely or even incorrectly here. I also can’t help but think how worrying too much about what others are doing in a non-zero-sum game like this one is bad strategy, making me pick a team not because I think it will win but in order to avoid what appears to be a larger cost should I miss the pick.

Hard not to play it safe and follow the crowd sometimes, though. Speaking of, figured out that post title yet?