To the Victor Belong the Spoils

Immersed right now in basketball, in particular the college conference tournaments.

My Atlantic Coast Conference is unrecognizable right now (something I wrote about a year ago over at Ocelot Sports), having bloated to 15 teams including Notre Dame which it seems like might be a far piece away from the Atlantic.

The bracket -- with byes and double-byes -- is like an algebra final, and while I think I can figure out who plays whom from this point forward, my Heels losing this afternoon has me reduced (more or less) to pulling against Duke.

Carolina most assuredly deserved to lose their game today against Pittsburgh. They came out flat, let the Panthers build a huge 20-point second half lead, then forged a too-little-too-late comeback to make the final score seem respectable. But while certain breaks didn’t quite go the Heels’ way, Pittsburgh deserved to win and UNC deserved to lose.

I found myself reflecting a little this afternoon how in sports, for the most part, that’s how games go -- the team who wins is generally given credit for having earned it, even if luck were involved. Only on those rare occasions when an official unreasonably influences the outcome with an erroneous call do fans or players or coaches ever bother to say the winner didn’t deserve to win or the loser didn’t deserve to lose.

I mean fans will say their team should have won or lost -- but generally they will still concede the outcome as creditable.

Poker, however, isn’t always like that. Especially tournament poker, where luck can play a crucial role. I know I’ve won tournaments in which I couldn’t necessarily argue without qualification that I “deserved” to win. And, of course, I’ve lost them, too, when I felt as though I was somehow robbed of a victory by an unfortunate sequence or some other fate-tipping factor.

These thoughts were inspired, I think, by a post published today over on the PokerStars blog by my buddy (and transatlantic running partner) Rick Dacey, titled “Opinion: Giving credit where credit is due.”

In the article Rick discusses how sometimes those following a poker tournament -- i.e., the “spectators” either watching a live stream or following live updates -- sometimes unreasonably deliver judgment regarding the skill level of those involved. He brings up in particular two recent tournament winners, EPT10 Barcelona winner Sotirios Koutoupas and UKIPT4 Isle of Man champ Duncan McLellan, as having earned some ill-informed criticism based mostly on an impression that they were unreasonably lucky to win their titles.

I watched Koutoupas’s win in Barcelona with Rick, helping him cover the event for the PS blog, and knew first-hand how the Greek player had impressed us all with his play for several days in that tournament. Rick notes how some fortunate hands for Koutoupas at the final table inspired some trolling, and so he invited Team Online member Mickey Petersen to do some analysis of a few key hands to help show how such judgments miss the mark.

A similar procedure is performed with McLellan’s performance, and the whole adds up to an interesting read that includes some worthwhile poker strategy discussion to boot.

Rick’s piece won’t stop the cries of “The bum got lucky!” when the next tournament is won, but it does remind us how hard it is to make unambiguous conclusions about poker players’ skill, especially given (1) the incomplete information we generally have as observers, and/or (2) the incomplete knowledge most of us possess when it comes to understanding how the game is played.

Anyhow, wanted to give Rick his due credit for a thoughtful and well written opinion. Meanwhile, I’m going to turn back to this N.C. State-Syracuse game and hope that the Wolfpack earns a well-deserved victory. After all, the last time these two played the Pack wuz robbed! (Or not.)

On the Bubble Boy

Earlier today I noticed Vanessa Selbst’s tweet from last night responding to the World Poker Tour having signed off its coverage of Day 2 of the Bay 101 Shooting Star by referring to the plan today to play down to the “bubble boy” of the six-handed televised final table.

Selbst humorously pointed out an unintended assumption made by the statement. “Since the WPT says it is playing down to its ‘television bubble boy’ tomorrow, just wanna say congrats to @candacepoker on her 1st WPT FT!”

Indeed, Candace Collins was among the final 36 making it to the end of play yesterday (and she’s in the top 10 in the early going today), so if she were to bubble the final table it obviously wouldn’t do to call her the “bubble boy.”

Selbst followed that tweet with another clarifying that those covering poker tournaments should stop summarily referring to poker players as male, and others chimed in afterwards to agree both with that point and to bring up other examples of poker’s male-centric culture still exhibiting several characteristics that can make the game seem less inviting to women.

I wholeheartedly agree with the larger point, as well as with the need for poker to be mindful of its long legacy of excluding women and to be especially conscious not to persist in doing so going forward, even if in unintentional ways.

Meanwhile, the initial tweet made me think about how it has been many years since I’ve actually used the term “bubble boy” to describe the last person out before the cash in a tournament. I know I used it early on in my reporting career (and here on the blog), but at some point I stopped doing so.

I didn’t stop because the term assumes that person is male. It goes without saying that I’d never been tempted to use “bubble boy” to describe a woman busting out just before the cash. Nor has anyone else, I imagine. I know I’ve seen “bubble girl” used in those situations.

I stopped because it just sounded silly. And kind of clichéd, too. There had to be a better way to describe the situation, I thought, and so I dropped the term from my poker vocabulary.

It’s sometimes hard not to use clichés, though, when it comes to reporting on poker tournaments. The “bubble” itself is a case in point. After all, when’s the last time someone wrote about a tournament reaching the money without employing that metaphor?

(Above is A young boy blowing soap bubbles, a painting created by a follower of the 17th century Dutch painter Reinier de la Haye.)

Supergrins

Was following a little of this story that popped up within the last couple of days regarding a new online poker site, suddenly appearing and available to U.S. players in all states -- i.e., rogue, not regulated -- and awkwardly-named Superwins.

Kind of a minor blip on the poker radar, this, but somewhat humorous given the apparently obvious connections between the new site and the fraudulent Lock Poker site from which the great majority of players have not been able to cash out their funds for many months now, more than a year in some cases.

The new site shares all of the same promotional jibber-jabber, conditions, bonus offers, and apparently the software is similar, too. And as was quickly sorted out in the forums and by others, the site’s domain is registered to Lock’s CEO, and some inquiries have apparently uncovered that the two sites share a player pool to some extent, making Superwins a “skin” (more or less).

It appears a fairly transparent Plan B (or F or G or whatever) by Lock to drum up some capital, although the fact that the word on Superwins has gotten out so quickly would seem to have prevented the site from ever gaining any momentum in that direction. Sure, there will be some uninformed suckers depositing on Superwins, but I think we’re well past the days that a new “U.S.-facing site” (as we would call ’em) can make much if any splash.

You can read a rundown and some commentary on the shenanigans over at Flushdraw. The part of the story that was most silly to me -- and also notable to Haley Hintze who authored the Flushdraw piece -- was the lame ad/review for Superwins on the Poker News Boy website where the new room is being promoted with surprising vigor.

That PNB rates the new room 9/10 is funny enough, although we must compare their 10/10 rating for Lock Poker for some idea of the fantasies perpetrated over there (and note as Haley does how PNB is owned by a Lock affiliate manager). The review’s odd syntax, sentence fragments, and breathless tone add further grins.

In fact, the more I look at it, the more every detail seems as though it could possess dual meaning, from the “big ambitions” of the site to its list of “popular methods” for depositing. Like a postmodern palimpsest with “straight” significances and built-in parody overlapped right on top of each other.

It wasn’t that long ago, though, that we were paying a lot more attention to new sites like this. Just after Black Friday they caught the eye of many, and some (like Lock, in fact) successfully attracted business. And before that there were dozens, some suspect, many appearing legit.

I guess it is the (increasingly dim) memory of those ads and that earlier era when the context for them was different -- and knowing that context is no more -- that makes looking at this new site and those trying to promote it as all the more risible.

More to Learn

Swamped again here on the farm and thus out of time to write much today. However, I did want to recommend some cool new posts that have appeared on Learn.PokerNews for those who might be interested.

Nate Meyvis returned today with a smart strategy piece titled “A Planning Exercise: What If I Get Ace-King?”

In the article Nate recommends spending time between hands thinking about how you might play A-K should it be dealt to you -- as the title suggests, kind of a mental exercise that forces you to think specifically about your opponents and their tendencies, stack sizes, and other factors in a preparatory way.

I really like the way he explains the exercise as well as the concrete questions and issues he invites the reader to consider while thinking about how he or she might play Big Slick.

I’ve done exactly the same thing before at the tables, not necessarily thinking about A-K specifically but just how I would next play a premium hand or a hand with which I’d likely want to open-raise. But I can’t claim I ever thought too carefully about how just going through the steps of thinking ahead in this way forces you to concentrate more on your opponents, your own image, and other important factors affecting table dynamics.

Also going up today on Learn was another one by Robert Woolley, a.k.a. the “Poker Grump,” in his “Casino Poker for Beginners” series. He’s writing about buttons right now -- not just the dealer’s button, but all of the many different ones used at the table (e.g., the absent button, the missed blinds buttons, etc.), and explaining their purpose and use.

I’m finding all of Bob’s “CFB” articles enjoyable to read, and with each one am thinking to myself “I wish I’d known” as I read through them. In fact each one also tends to include at least something I still didn’t know about (or was at least a little fuzzy on), and he presents it all in an interesting and entertaining way, too. So check out all of the “CFB” articles if you haven’t already, and I’ll bet you find something interesting and informative.

And while I’m at it, if you missed Tommy Angelo’s latest about the “Cinderella Syndrome” in poker (hint: it has to do with knowing when to quit), take a look at that, too.

The Three-Bet

The term “three-bet” (and “four-bet” and so on) has become especially common in poker these days, although that development is relatively recent. In fact, I don’t really remember people using the phrase that much even five years ago.

Generally speaking, people say “three-bet” when referring to a reraise that happens before the flop in hold’em. (Occasionally you’ll hear some use the term when talking about post-flop action, though not that often.) In other words, the big blind is the first forced bet, the first raise is a second bet (although that initial raise is never, ever called a “two-bet”), then the first reraise becomes a “three-bet.”

I remember a few years ago reading some discussion about the term, probably inspired by its having first become somewhat popular and a person on a forum wondering about its origin. I recall the explanation for the term connected it to fixed-limit hold’em where the first raise equals two bets, the next equals three, and so on. Even though the raises in no-limit hold’em aren’t of fixed amounts, the terminology was borrowed and used in the same way to describe successive raises/reraises.

I can’t recall the first time I heard the term, but I remember being a little confused by it initially. It’s really not obvious what a “three-bet” means if you’ve never heard the term before, but nowadays almost everyone says “he three-bet” rather than “he reraised” when discussing preflop play. I guess I’ve become conscious of the term’s less-than-obvious meaning thanks to working with Learn.PokerNews and thinking more specifically about new and beginning players who perhaps aren’t up on all of the terminology just yet.

In any event, now everyone uses the term, and in fact it seems almost weird not to. It is so common of a term there’s a clothing line named after it. PokerListings even calls its daily recap of three big stories of the day the “Daily 3-bet.”

I brought the subject up with a friend today and we speculated that the increased use of the term likely coincided with more adventurous preflop betting -- that is, with more and more three-bets actually occurring before the flop. And with all of the “light” reraising and “clicking back” (i.e., raising/reraising the minimum) becoming popular, that has given even more impetus to people using “three-bet,” “four-bet,” and so on when talking about preflop action.

It is helpful, actually, as a kind of shorthand to say “he five-bet shoved” as a way of quickly explaining how many reraises preceded the all-in bet. Or to distinguish between three-betting and four-betting (and five-betting, etc.) when discussing preflop strategy and putting players on ranges and so forth.

Still, it’s a curious term, and one that continues to have a kind of odd disconnect for me. After all, the “three-bet” is the second action (when speaking of preflop betting). Even though I understand the term, there’s a strangeness to it that I’m also always aware of when I hear or read it.

Talking Ice, Power, and Limit Hold’em

Had a decent-sized ice storm hit us starting before dawn today with the cold temps and freezing precipitation lasting into the early afternoon.

We woke up to no power and as I write here just after dinner time we’re still without, although after successfully cranking up our generator (a must for farm living) we’re enjoying a window of a few hours of power before bedtime. That pic is of two of our barn cats, Lily and Moe, who like Vera and myself figured out how to make do.

With little time to write I just wanted to point folks to Nolan Dalla’s latest piece on his personal blog, one that focuses on limit hold’em and how it was once all the rage in poker rooms prior to the “boom” and now finds itself a threatened game not unlike five-card draw and other rarely spread variants.

Dalla titles his post provocatively -- indeed, pretty much everything he posts on his blog is provocative -- calling it “Mason Malmuth Was Right (Limit vs. No-Limit Hold’em).” The title is referring back to Malmuth’s prediction way back in the early 1990s that no-limit hold’em had little chance of catching on, something he had written in a volume of his Poker Essays.

I actually wrote a little something last summer about this very same passage in Malmuth’s book, coming in a chapter titled “The Future of Poker.” It’s one of those predictions that reads much, much differently from our perspective, of course, and Dalla offers some reasonable justification both for Malmuth’s position back then and for his underlying arguments about no-limit hold’em actually still being valid despite the fact that NLHE has not only lasted but has grown into the single most popular variant of poker played for the last several years.

I can’t delve into the entire discussion just now, but you can read what Dalla has to say and decide for yourself what you think about the points he makes. I will say that as a LHE player myself, I’ve always felt similarly to Dalla that the game is more fun than NLHE, and in fact to me provides a lot more action in the form of constant decisions and the higher percentage of hands played.

I even wrote a kind of defense of LHE for Learn.PokerNews some time back called “Limit Hold’em Isn’t Always Like Watching Paint Dry” in which I made a couple of the same points Dalla does about why LHE is fun, perhaps especially so for beginners and/or recreational players.

Anyhow, follow those links for more Friday evening reading. Meanwhile, I’m going to go try to enjoy a couple more hours’ worth of power here before we shut it down for the night. Might go check on the cats one more time, too, although I’m sure they’re doing fine.

Click to Confirm: Finally, Those FTP Funds

Because I just came from the Full Tilt Poker Claims Administration website being managed by the Garden City Group and the pursuit of my long lost FTP balance is foremost in my thoughts at the moment, I thought I’d share a quick update regarding that quest today.

I mentioned less than a week ago -- on “Green Friday” -- how I hadn’t been part of that first wave of U.S. players getting their funds back, but I did feel fairly confident I’d be among the second group. My confidence stemmed from another cordial and what seemed to me productive exchange over the phone with a GCG representative, with that conversation ending with a promise of an email follow-up.

Indeed that email arrived today with my correct petition and control numbers and an invitation to log in over at the site and see if the balance they had listed for me was what I had left in my account back in mid-April 2011.

I followed the instructions, corrected some contact info, then clicked through to the page showing what they believed to be my balance. And it was... correct! I actually did a faint little fist pump at the laptop, kind of a dim, gestural reprise of all those years of playing on Full Tilt.

Had to click through a few more screens, including one on which I had to give information to facilitate repayment, and I was done. No idea how long it will take, but the prospects seem better than ever that I will finally be cashing out from Full Tilt Poker.

Last night I was listening to Todd Witteles’s weekly show on Poker Fraud Alert where I heard that Chris “Jesus” Ferguson is apparently planning to return to the poker world in the near future, perhaps at this summer’s WSOP. Witteles was relating news shared by Diamond Flush in a Two Plus Two thread a few days ago.

I enjoy Witteles’s show and have found myself either listening live or seeking out the podcast practically every week lately. His take on the Ferguson news was appropriately negative -- this is a “second coming... we don’t want,” says Witteles -- and I can’t really disagree with his view.

Thinking back at the absurd spiral FTP had entered into at the time, if it weren’t for Black Friday coming when it did, we’d all have lost our FTP funds permanently. And of course if it weren’t for PokerStars striking its deal with the DOJ later, we would’ve have been SOL, too.

Assuming there isn’t a coincidence that news of Jesus’s plan to resurrect his poker career -- the puns are all so dangerously close here -- comes just as U.S. players are starting to get their funds back. We’ll see what happens with that. Meanwhile, keeping eyes peeled for another, long belated return in my bank account.

On the Clock (It’s a Matter of Time)

All of this “shot clock” talk happening these days in the poker world -- and gathering a lot of momentum of late -- has been interesting to follow.

In fact, I’m finding the whole dynamic of discussion-slash-debate among players and tournament organizers that seems a constant presence in poker diverting. Seems like everything is on the table these days, perhaps more a function of social media than any specific poker-related development.

Rich Ryan reported on the vote among players that happened this week at the World Poker Tour L.A. Poker Classic, the one that resulted in 80% of players saying they favored the introduction of a “shot clock” on the WPT next season. We had a piece on Learn.PokerNews discussing the topic as well. That pic, by the way, is an inset from one taken at an earlier LAPC event a couple of weeks ago in which a clock was used.

I find it hard to drop the scare quotes because the term isn’t exactly descriptive. The clock being proposed would limit the amount of time a player has to act, and shooting hasn’t really been a common feature of poker since the Old West. Still, everyone knows what is meant by the idea of a shot clock in poker, and indeed the subject has been discussed for more than a couple of years now.

I personally don’t like the idea at all. I understand the problem of excessive, unnecessary tanking and definitely would encourage measures to prevent it. But introducing a shot clock -- especially a 30-second one such as was used in that A$100,000 Challenge event at the recent Aussie Millions and was being discussed at the WPT LAPC -- seems to me like it would introduce several more problems (and probably not even satisfactorily solve this one).

Looking at it from the perspective of a non-pro player, I also dislike the idea and imagine many other non-pros feel the same. While people can adapt to just about anything, my sense is facing the prospect of playing with a shot clock would prove a big turnoff to newer players.

I guess I also find the idea of a shot clock a little too great of a violation of the “natural” rhythm of the game, which like baseball contains a kind of beauty precisely because of the way it accommodates individual differences when it comes to the pace with which each person plays. (Of course, there’s a similar discussion happening in baseball, too, over whether or not some time restrictions should be introduced to shorten games.)

All of which is to say I think a shot clock in poker could be interesting here and there, but wouldn’t like seeing it become a standard part of the game. That said, it is starting to feel like the introduction of this shot clock thing in tournament poker might be only a matter of time (pun intended).

Assigning Bradshaw and McGuire

Among the readings I assign in my “Poker in American Film and Culture” class is a chapter from Paul McGuire’s Lost Vegas: The Redneck Riviera, Existentialist Conversations with Strippers, and the World Series of Poker.

The chapter comes from the latter part of the book when Dr. Pauly is at his most cynical regarding the commercial spectacle of the WSOP, the chapter ending with a funny punchline about Phil Hellmuth’s increasingly elaborate entrances to the Main Event up to that point (2008).

Pauly suggests Hellmuth try riding in one year on a donkey. “I can only imagine the snarky headlines,” he writes. “‘Ass Rides Ass to WSOP.’”

I assign the reading alongside another favorite of mine, Jon Bradshaw, writing in Fast Company about a much smaller World Series of Poker happening some 35 years before. I’ve reviewed Bradshaw’s book here before, an excellent example of long form journalism that includes several great essays, including the one about Johnny Moss I have my students read.

Unlike McGuire, Bradshaw is much more admiring of his subjects whom he treats almost as though they are larger than life. Both authors are insightful about the WSOP and poker’s broader relationship to American culture, and the contrast of their perspectives gives the students a lot to consider which makes the discussions especially enjoyable for me.

Some occasionally find Pauly a little snarky. But most are entertained and enjoy the inventiveness of his style. And they respond, too, to his overall point about the commercialization of the game, something which indeed reflects larger trends happening in America not just in poker but in other cultural forums, too.

Anyhow, the discussion this week reminded me of how much I enjoyed Pauly’s book. If you’re interested in the WSOP’s history -- and in particular that 2005-2008 period he covers most closely -- and haven’t read Lost Vegas before, I recommend it.

A lot has changed over the last five years at the WSOP, I think, and, of course, in poker, generally speaking and its place in the U.S. over the same period. And of course it has all changed even more dramatically since the 1970s when Bradshaw wrote about poker and gambling and the WSOP. But many of the observations made in both books still apply, too, which along with the strong writing is why I recommend both.

Game Culture

Sunday ended up being a workday for me, although the latter part of it I spent with the laptop in my immediate view and the Oscars playing out on the television a little farther away. Watched the whole sucker, more or less. I think the last time I did that Titanic swept the statues.

I don’t get out to see too many movies these days, not the current fare at least. I’ve been watching a few these last couple of months while we enjoy some free premium channels after initiating a new satellite setup in our new place, but we’ll let those channels go soon as we don’t spend enough time watching to justify the expense.

Of the ones highlighted last night I’d only seen Gravity, and that was on a plane (as I wrote about here a few weeks ago describing my trip home from EPT Deauville) -- hardly the ideal setting to take in the effects-laden spectacle, although I did form an appreciation of the film nonetheless. Not seeing the rest I can’t really say one way or another whether the trophies were handed out in a way that was deserving.

Found myself thinking a little about how on a certain level awards shows kind of weirdly make “games” out of pursuits and entertainments that aren’t really competitions at all. That up above is a “2014 Awards Season Scorecard” put out by Yahoo, further emphasizing the “sport” of such shows. I guess the Academy Awards are really like the playoffs, complete with favorites and underdogs, significant betting on outcomes and pools, and various kinds of scorekeeping taking place throughout the night.

I remember several months back listening to an episode of “B.S. Report” and getting a little frustrated with a lengthy discussion between host Bill Simmons and a guest regarding the acting career of Jodie Foster. It is a sports podcast (primarily), and so it shouldn’t have struck me as odd to hear the discussants pursue an analogy between Foster’s oeuvre and the career, say, of an NBA player. But after a while it felt like an unnecessarily narrow method of analysis.

Her two Academy Awards for Best Actress were likened to MVP or championship seasons. A stretch of non-remarkable roles stood for a lengthy slump. Her acting skills were questioned in the same way a player’s ability is, with an argument pursued that her apparent career highlights were more the product of fortunate casting and support (i.e., being on a strong “team”) than individual ability.

And so on. It was interesting, but seemed way too easy and ultimately not that revealing. In other words, the “sports guy” was talking about something that wasn’t sports as if it were, and finally I just wanted him instead to talk about sports again.

But that’s not to say such an approach can’t be insightful, nor that it is even wrong to make a “game” out of the act of criticism or evaluating artistic performance. It might even be inevitable, the way we tend to judge pretty much anything by making comparisons or ranking or assigning grades.

Heck, as I go to hit publish I’m already imagining giving myself a score out of 10 on this post. What would you say... 6? 7?