Is DFS Helping or Hurting?

Daily fantasy sports were already of great interest to poker players even before all of the hubbub began surrounding the industry not quite two weeks ago. Since then, DFS has attracted the attention of many others, too, including the mainstream media, legislators, and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation according to a report appearing late today in The Wall Street Journal.

I was writing last week about how the histories of online poker and daily fantasy sports have intersected and (in a few ways) even paralleled one another. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 that played an integral role in removing online poker as an option for most U.S. players also made online gambling on fantasy sports possible, which in turn led to the birth and eventual growth of DFS into a highly conspicuous option available to those in all but a small handful of states.

As the probing of DFS continues, I can’t help but believe it hurts the prospects for online poker in the U.S. a lot more than it helps. But I could be wrong.

I’ve seen a few folks suggesting how the calls for federal regulation and other inquiries into DFS could eventually lead to a revisiting of online gambling laws in the U.S., including the UIGEA, with some change on the federal level regarding online poker being a possible consequence. But to me it looks more like online poker will get buried further underneath the weight of moral outrage at DFS and the “loophole” it has found to permit legal online gambling (as some view it).

What do you think? When it comes to the future of online poker in the U.S., is DFS helping or hurting?

Negative-EV: Nixon’s “Last Press Conference”

My “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics” class is going well so far. We’re about halfway through the semester, and as the course is organized chronologically to follow RMN’s life and career we’ve now arrived at the tumultuous year of 1968 when Nixon completes what was really a most improbable comeback to win the presidency.

After losing a very close election to John F. Kennedy in 1960 (Nixon’s first political defeat), then getting soundly beaten by Pat Brown in the 1962 California governor race, it seemed very likely Nixon would be moving on from politics, probably using the law degree he’d earned from Duke University to move over into a legal career. Indeed, he and his family would soon move to New York City where Nixon would become a senior partner in a law firm, spending the next few years hovering at the political periphery (and eventually plotting his return).

In terms of American political history, Nixon’s comeback was almost unprecedented. That is to say, only once before had a major party’s candidate run for president and lost, then managed to run again subsequently and win. But that was Grover Cleveland way back in 1892, and he’d actually been president for a term once before (from 1885-1888) and in fact had won the popular vote in 1888 though lost the electoral vote to Benjamin Harrison.

So really no one who hadn’t previously been president before had ever run in the general election and lost, then later run again and won (as a major party candidate, that is). Several had tried, including William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Dewey, and most recently Adlai Stevenson (who lost to Eisenhower in both 1952 and 1956). But none had managed to pull it off.

But the odds seemed even longer for Nixon. After all, he had lost another race in between for a lesser office. Not only that, after conceding the ’62 race, Nixon then delivered a spiteful series of comments directed toward the press, ending with a sarcastic reference to how they’d lament his absence going forward.

“As I leave you I want you to know -- just think how much you’re going to be missing,” he said. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

A couple of months back a poker player I follow tweeted out a reference to this moment, alluding to it as he described himself petulantly leaving a cash game in which he’d lost. I wish I could remember who the player was and find the tweet again, but essentially he was self-deprecatingly chiding himself for behaving badly, having said something like “you won’t have me to kick around anymore” as he left the table.

It seems like an entirely negative-EV play for Nixon to have made, regardless of his future plans. In his memoirs he reports that Murray Stans (then an advisor, later Nixon’s campaign finance chairman and one of the many implicated in Watergate) “told me he thought it would cost me $100,000 a year in new legal clients.”

Meanwhile in the wake of the “last press conference,” many pundits leaped in to pronounce Nixon’s career finished. In fact within the week ABC aired a special called The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon, kind of figuratively throwing dirt on his coffin. The show even featured a couple of Nixon’s formerly defeated foes, Jerry Voorhis (whom Nixon crushed in ’46 in a race for Congress) and Alger Hiss (whom Nixon accused of being a Soviet spy and successfully pursued a perjury conviction that earned Hiss time in prison).

Characteristically, Nixon thought differently about his performance, saying how he “never regretted what I said at the ‘last press conference.’” In fact he spun it into a positive, claiming that “it gave the media a warning that I would not sit back and take whatever biased coverage was dished out to me,” claiming it was “partially responsible for the much fairer treatment I received from the press during the next few years.”

“From that point of view alone,” he concludes, “it was worth it.”

For Nixon, the press was essentially an opponent. In the “last press conference” he notes to the reporters how he “welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you,” underscoring the way he viewed their interactions as antagonistic -- as a competition, even, with the potential to win or lose.

But if the press were an opponent, they were especially difficult to “play” against. No matter how many times Nixon thought he was putting in the last bet, they just kept on calling and/or raising to continue the hand.

Cubing the Cards

A week ago came a press release from something called Mediarex Sports & Entertainment, parent company of the Global Poker Index, announcing this new Global Poker League that is set to launch early next year.

The presser describes the desire of the GPI and its CEO Alex Dreyfus to “sportify” poker “in a bid for the Global Poker Index to become the equivalent of the NASCAR, NFL, NBA, ATP, or PGA for poker.” In an interview with PokerNews, Dreyfus underscored the importance of making poker spectator friendly, with the GPL and its planned-for schedule intended as a step in that direction.

The GPL will consist of 12 teams, it sounds like, who will compete with each other over the course of a 14-week schedule. Sounds like an extension of the earlier Global Poker Masters experiment from back in March of this year -- you can read details over on the Mediarex website.

“We wanted to think out of the box,” explains Dreyfus in the PN interview. Not sure if the pun was intended or not, but the GPL will have players playing inside a box -- “The Cube,” that is, described as the GPL’s “signature arena” à la UFC’s Octagon.

I’ve been skimming for several minutes now this elaborate page describing “The Cube” on the Mediarex site, though to be honest the idea still kind of escapes me. It is like a big clear box that kind of reminds me of the squash class I once took. (The photo credits to “SquashPics.com” might have further planted that seed for me.)

The “arena” lets both TV viewers (or Twitch or whatever) as well as a live audience see and hear the players as well as access all the stats, cards, bets, and so on -- again, I suppose kind of replicating watching or attending a sporting event with a scoreboard nearby tallying relevant data and results.

I’m not real sure what all of this is or is supposed to be. It doesn’t look much like poker, and of course no previous attempts at team-based poker have ever really worked to produce more than a curiosity.

It excites some curiosity, sure, and I’ll be staying tuned to see what happens. “The Cube” feels like a big weird roll of the dice, although without knowing exactly what is being gambled it’s hard to have a rooting interest just yet.

Winners, Losers, and Playoff Randomness

The Major League Baseball playoffs have begun, and with them the annual conversation has also started about how even though a 162-game season does a good job determining who the best teams are, the much smaller sample size of the playoffs increases the chance element markedly, often making it hard unequivocally to anoint the World Series winner as the season’s greatest team.

We talk about sample sizes a lot in poker, more often than not about how inadequate they are. We talk about variance, too, and how luck necessarily invites a disruption between what is and what ought to be.

The new wild-card playoff -- a one-game, winner-take-all-affair -- with which the MLB playoffs now always begin encourages such discussions even more, with each league producing one team who after 162 games will lose the 163rd and head home for the winter. The Pittsburgh Pirates, losers of the NL wild card earlier this week to the Chicago Cubs, had it happen for a second year in a row.

Just like like year when the Pirates ran into the hottest starting pitcher in baseball, Madison Bumgarner of the San Francisco Giants (then the Giants went on to win the whole sucker), this time they were up against the Cubs’ Jake Arrieta who is on a historic streak of success over the last several months. Both Bumgarner and Arrieta pitched complete game shutouts to oust the Pirates, this year after the team won 98 games (more than every other playoff team except the St. Louis Cardinals who took the Pirates’ division by winning 100).

For the Pirates it has been #JBL, as the poker-related hashtag would go.

In the NFL teams play 16 games, then enter into a series of single-elimination playoff games which obviously heighten the randomness more than a little (especially for a sport in whcih injuries are so significant). Even so, the 16-to-1 regular-season-to-playoff ratio is still not as big as the 162-to-7 ratio (or about 23-to-1) in the MLB. That’s looking ahead to the best-of-seven series coming up later for the league championships and World Series. That’s also assuming teams get to seven games in those series, which often they do not.

The NBA and NHL each play 82-game regular seasons and feature best-of-sevens each round of their playoffs (a little less than 12-to-1). NCAA basketball has it worse, I suppose, with a 35-game season (roughly) then a single-elimination tournament at the end.

Having playoffs is still better than not having them, I think, as college football proved for several decades up until the institution of the Bowl Championship Series from 1998-2013 and the College Football Playoff starting last year. Voting on the best team never worked well, nor does applying the incredibly complicated advanced analytics that are available these days to “let the computer decide.”

No, it’s best to have the teams play it out. It’s a little like a well played poker hand resulting in an all-in on the turn and something that is often close to a coin flip situation thereafter. Skill helped the players get into a position to win, then luck necessarily plays a role thereafter.

WSOP Europe Begins in Berlin

The World Series of Poker Europe quietly began today at the Spielbank Berlin Casino in Germany. I say “quietly” because I can’t remember there ever having been less buzz about the WSOPE before.

This marks the eighth installment of the WSOPE which dates back to 2007. It’s also the first one to come after a two-year gap after there having been seven straight years’ worth of WSOPEs from 2007 to 2013.

From 2007-2010 the WSOPE took place in London, growing from three to five bracelet events over that stretch. Then from 2011-2013 the festival traveled to France, taking place in Cannes twice then moving to Enghien-les-Bains (north of Paris) in 2013. There were seven bracelet events for each of those two years in Cannes, then eight bracelet events in Enghien-les-Bains.

This year there are 10 bracelet events, with buy-ins ranging from as little as a couple of €550 buy-in events (one no-limit hold’em, one pot-limit Omaha) up to the €10,450 NLHE Main Event and a €25,600 High Roller. Looks like a small field of 197 showed up for today’s Event No. 1, a €2,200 NLHE 6-Max. event.

Most of what I saw over Twitter the last couple of weeks with regard to WSOPE were occasional notes from players wondering how to wire funds to Berlin and appearing to run into hurdles preventing them from doing so. Now that things have started, there are some updates (in English) on WSOP.com and also live reporting (in German) on the PokerFirma site (where the WSOP updates are also being funneled through).

Things pick up, coverage-wise, this weekend with live streaming of several events on Twitch starting tomorrow. I think, though, that neither the Main Event nor the High Roller is going to be featured there, as those are being shot for ESPN. (Not 100% sure about that.) Here’s the presser spelling out what WSOP is doing to cover the series.

For various reasons it feels almost more like a WSOP Circuit stop than a major stop (looking at it from afar, that is), with the upcoming European Poker Tour festivals in Malta (later this month) and Prague (in December) seeming more significant by comparison.

We’ll see how (or if) the bracelet buzz builds by the time the Main rolls around. Not hearing too much as yet, though.

The 2015 WSOP Main Event on ESPN (So Far)

ESPN’s coverage of the 2015 World Series of Poker has been up and running for four weeks now, with eight-and-a-half hours’ worth of shows shown so far. I think that total is correct, anyway, as an extra half-hour turned up this week.

They’ve moved the shows around some on the schedule, making it challenging to find them sometimes, although mostly they’ve been popping up on Monday nights. The strategy appears to be mostly to put the episodes on one network while NFL football is playing on the other, which I have to think hasn’t helped a lot with ratings. It also means I’ve actually never watched any of them initially but only later on DVR.

I’ve somewhat enjoyed the coverage thus far. I didn’t plan on it beforehand, but was inspired to start a series of strategy articles (over on PokerNews) each of which focuses on an interesting hand or two while giving readers a chance to play along. The response has been pretty good on these, which all include polls that invite you to pick how you would play a certain hand. (When setting the scene, I withhold the hole cards of the player with whom you play along.)

Here are those so far (the headline of the first one is quoting something a player said at the table):

“Watching Phil Hellmuth or ‘The Master at Work’”

”Daniel Negreanu Turns the Nuts -- Call or Reraise?”

”How Would You Respond to Negreanu’s Check-Raises?”

”Flopping Huge Versus Fedor -- Play Fast or Slow?”

I think all of them present genuinely interesting spots that are made a little more fun from a strategic standpoint when you don’t know all the players’ holdings. Watching the shows with an eye toward finding such spots is probably adding significantly to my enjoyment of them, too, I would venture.

As those titles suggest, the coverage to this point has featured a lot of Hellmuth (until he busted) and Negreanu, with the latter destined to be front and center all of the way up to the November Nine thanks to his near-miss of the final table.

They started with Day 4 this year, and by now they’ve gotten to the end of Day 5 at which point just 69 remain from the 6,420 who entered. Would have been preferable, I think, to start back on Day 1 and give a couple of hours to each of the days (rather than four or more for both Day 4 and 5), but obviously it’s cheaper to shoot fewer days.

Starting on Day 4 means they actually began after the bubble burst (on Day 3), which skips one of the more exciting moments of the Main Event. This year, too, with 1,000 players cashing, there were certainly dozens (if not hundreds) of cool stories about first-time players/cashers which might have been entertaining to hear about, along with all of the other fun stuff that tends to mark the early days of the WSOP ME.

Still, I’m finding I’ve been looking forward to the shows each week. Have you been watching at all? What do you think?

The DFS “Scandal” and Online Poker’s Past

Late last week I was following a few tweets and read a post on what appeared to be a yet-to-explode forum thread regarding this story about a DraftKings employee accidentally releasing ownership data for the Week 3 NFL games during the afternoon that Sunday, including ownership for games that hadn’t started yet.

The post appeared on the RotoGrinders site in a forum thread titled “DraftKings Ownership Leak.” Like I say, the thread didn’t seem to have gotten much attention, although if I remember correctly subsequent posts (which I don’t see today) made it seem like the thread might have been locked early.

The first response (that remains) was from someone at RotoGrinders saying he was talking to a person named Ethan at DK who was about to post a statement. The RotoGrinders guy defends Ethan and DraftKings. Then Ethan’s statement appears, and he explains how “I was the only person with this data and as a DK employee am not allowed to play on the site.” An innocuous-seeming, nothing-to-see-here-please-disperse kind of exchange.

This back-and-forth sat there quietly for a couple of days, but over weekend Twitter picked up the story in a big way, and by yesterday it had developed considerably with more details about the data leak as well as information about the employee Ethan Haskell’s successes on the rival FanDuel site, including a massive $350,000 win for finishing second in FD’s $5M NFL Sunday Million during Week 3. More on Haskell himself has been made more generally known as well, including his position at DK (Written Content Manager) and his previous experience as a content editor for a couple of years at RotoGrinders (perhaps explaining the RG guy’s defense of him in the thread).

It should be noted that there is no evidence that Haskell used any of the info he accidentally leaked to help him land the big prize in the FD contest (or in other games). In any event, the story has now ballooned into a larger discussion about daily fantasy sports, in particular about potential problems with game integrity.

Legal Sports Report has been a good site to follow for coverage of the many issues arising with this story as well as other DFS-related topics. This article from the weekend titled “DraftKings Lineup Leak Rocks Daily Fantasy Industry: Questions and Answers” provides details of the original story, a full explanation of why “insider” knowledge of DFS player ownership data ahead of time can provide a huge edge, and other issues having to do with the sites’ policies and current lack of regulation. The article also includes new statements from both DraftKings and FanDuel from Monday about their intentions to review their “internal controls” and policies.

The story has now moved into the mainstream as well, with even The New York Times reporting on it yesterday in “Scandal Erupts in Unregulated World of Fantasy Sports.” Thanks in large part to the highly conspicuous blitz of television advertising by both DFS and FD, the topic of daily fantasy sports is no longer interesting just to those who play but to others, too, who have been inundated so aggressively with all the ads.

Those of us who were involved with online poker when it first appeared and began to grow in popularity can’t help but notice several parallels seeming to emerge with regard to this story.

Like with DFS, online poker was around for a few years before suddenly catching fire. Planet Poker was the first online site to deal real money games, doing so on January 1, 1998. A little over five years later came the first episodes of the World Poker Tour, then Chris Moneymaker’s win at the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event, and then the “boom,” generally speaking.

Last week I noted the anniversary of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, a piece of legislation that interestingly has had the dual significance of helping jettison online poker from the U.S. while introducing a means for what has now evolved into the DFS industry to be introduced. The first DFS site (Fantasy Sports Live) went live in June 2007, with that industry’s “boom” (as it were) also not occurring until several years later.

As online poker grew more popular, the potential for scandals began to grow as well with much discussion about possible industry-threatening problems on the horizon. Lots of stories about collusion, ghosting, multi-accounting, and other violations of sites’ terms and conditions were circulating, as were instances of player funds being lost with the boom-preceding PokerSpot controversy the biggest early example to occur.

Then on September 12, 2007 a player going by the username POTRIPPER won the $100K Guarantee on Absolute Poker after correctly calling an opponent’s final hand all-in with just ten-high. My first reaction -- chronicled in a post here a week-and-a-half later -- was to wonder about AP getting hacked somehow or perhaps there having been an “inside job.” As we would come to learn, the latter was indeed the case, something AP would initially try to cover up (thereby making the scandal worse). The story then quickly took off in a big way both within the poker world and in the mainstream (including an article in The New York Times).

The loser of that crazy ten-high hand versus POTRIPPER was poker pro Marco Johnson who emailed AP afterwards to request hand histories from the tournament. Johnson didn’t initially study the response, but after buzz about the hand and other possible shenanigans at AP had begun to build he went back to look at those hand histories again and discovered something remarkable. Not only were his hole cards listed, but so, too, were the hole cards of all the other players. The hand histories then became a “break in the case” helping prove POTRIPPER was able to see others’ hole cards and a first step in unraveling the “superuser” scandal.

The larger superuser scandal that would follow at AP sister site UltimateBet (a story that first broke in early 2008) would similarly start out focusing on a single player -- “NioNio” -- who won at an insanely high rate on UB right up until the week the AP scandal broke at which time the player suddenly disappeared from UB. (That scatter plot graph above created by Michael Josem famously illustrated NioNio’s dominance.) Other suspicious accounts were then identified, and the story and scandal got bigger and bigger from there, never being truly resolved (despite former UB part-owner and representative Phil Hellmuth’s revisionist claims to the contrary).

At least a few parallels can be seen here -- an accidental “leak” of information by a site suddenly opening the door to closer scrutiny and suggestions of wrongdoing, a focus on “insider” information allegedly helping an employee to win (in the DFS case by going onto a different site to play), and remarkably high win rates inspiring accusations of an imbalance in the playing field.

The unambiguous advantage of seeing others’ hole cards and the less obvious advantage of having access to ownership data before games close in DFS perhaps don’t seem analgous (to most of us). But those who understand DFS strategy and how the games work have persuasively put forward the parallel. Again, this issue isn’t unrelated to other ones affecting the game, including the huge knowledge gap between number-crunching DFS regs and everyone else, something that is also akin to what we’ve often talked about in online poker where third-party software and other aids have created a significant advantage for a segment of full-timers over those who don’t benefit from the information provided by such tools.

Online poker survived (and mostly continued to thrive) despite the AP and UB scandals, with the sites themselves even able to remain in operation until both collapsed post-Black Friday (resulting in another huge loss of players’ funds). There continued to be serious problems with game integrity thereafter, of course, and the Black Friday indictment and civil complaint would dramatically demonstrate even larger issues for the industry.

I’m actually not quite ready to join the torch-carrying crowd currently storming the gates of DFS. I will say, though, as someone already not hugely inspired to get involved with DFS, recent developments are hardly encouraging me to give it an earnest try.

That said, knowing how similar things unfolded and turned out with online poker, it will be curious to see where the faster-moving DFS “scandal” goes next.

253,698

Today 253,698 people played a poker tournament. No shinola.

The tournament cost just one penny to play, the kickoff event of PokerStars’ “Common Cents” series that runs through Sunday. It started just after two o’clock this afternoon Eastern time, and with a turbo structure played all of the way down to a winner in six hours and 38 minutes.

The starting stack was 1,500, so after the final hand winner DaDumon of Austria had collected 380,547,000 chips to earn the $10K first prize. Omitting freerolls, it’s probably safe to say winning 1 million times the buy-in equals the best ROI anyone has ever enjoyed in a poker tournament.

The total prize pool was $100,000, the tournament’s guarantee. This was one instance where a tournament’s organizers well knew the field would not come close to reaching the number needed to match the guarantee, as PokerStars knew there wouldn’t be 10 million players taking part. (They capped the sucker at 300,000, actually.) In fact, the whole event was practically a big donation to PokerStars players, as $2,536.98 in buy-ins meant a $97,463.02 overlay.

Still, over a quarter million is quite something -- a new record, in fact, breaking the earlier one set on PokerStars in June 2013 when 225,000 played a $1 buy-in tournament featured as part of PS’s 100 Billionth Hand celebration.

How many other games can be played with just two players or more than a quarter million?

Getting It Wrong

Watched that Thursday Night Football clash last night to the bitter end. Was a pretty poorly played game, with a lot of endgame weirdness to create an unexpected outcome and thus enough extra drama to keep me watching to the last.

A couple of weeks pack I shared a pleasure-pain ranking system for evaluating my Pigskin Pick’em picks. Last night’s game -- which I got wrong -- ended up way over on the extreme pain side of the spectrum.

I picked the Steelers, who thanks to an unreliable field goal kicker and some especially bone-headed coaching decisions allowed the Ravens to complete a 13-point comeback to win in overtime. Making things worse, many in the pool (including the leader) had taken Baltimore, making it doubly unpleasant to lose after having with a couple of minutes left prematurely congratulated myself for having picked a winner. (Amateur move.)

I mentioned how the Steelers’ field goal kicker, Josh Scobee, had a rough night, missing two in the fourth quarter. Both were very late, and both happened with Pittsburgh ahead 20-17. The first miss was a 49-yarder with 2:29 to go, and the second a 41-yarder with 1:06 left.

As I had a rooting interest, I wasn’t happy to see Pittsburgh missing field goals. I was less happy, though, to see the Steelers even attempt them. Why? Because I was convinced each time that trying a field goal lessened rather than increased their chances of winning the game.

If Pitt. had made either FG, they’d have gone up by six, thereby forcing Baltimore to drive the length of the field in the hopes of scoring what would be a winning TD. Down just three, Baltimore instead played for the tie and overtime, and after being unsuccessful on the first try did manage to do so when given a second opportunity.

Because Pittsburgh missed their FG attempts, Baltimore played for the tie and overtime. They failed the first time, but given a second opportunity the Ravens were able to get close enough to kick a long tying field goal at the end of regulation.

When Pittsburgh missed the first FG attempt, then, it more or less assured they would not lose the game in regulation, as the Ravens then went for the tie (they still could lose in OT, of course). If Pittsburgh had hit the FG, however, there would have been a non-zero chance they could lose in regulation. Weighing the chances of losing in overtime (after Balt. hit a game-tying FG following a Pitts. miss) versus losing in regulation (after Balt. scored a game-winning TD after a Pitts. make), I suppose hitting that first FG would have been marginally better than punting, although not by much.

But when the Steelers held Baltimore on downs, then faced a similar decision with less time on the clock (and Baltimore having used their timeouts), trying the FG again was surely a poor decision (especially considering the inconsistent Scobee had just missed one). Punting and pinning the Ravens inside the 20 would have been a much, much better choice. Doing so would have further reduced the chance of Baltimore driving for a winning TD (because of a longer field), although that likely wouldn’t have been the Ravens’ aim, anyway, since the tying FG would’ve been a primary goal for them.

A Twitter exchange at the time involving Grantland’s NFL guru Bill Barnwell succinctly summed up the situation. A follower asked him “why did Pitt go for FG?” adding “Wouldn’t you rather be up by 3 than 6 there? Have Balt play for FG and OT instead of TD and win?” (This is the point I’m making.)

Barnwell’s response delivered the same observation in a different way: “NFL coaches optimize decisions to put off losing for as long as possible, not to win.” This was a point he made in greater detail a couple of weeks ago in a column where he was describing almost exactly the same scenario in a different game:

“Trailing by three in a two-minute drill, coaches will almost [always] settle for a field goal to try to push the game into overtime,” explained Barnwell. “They optimize their decision-making to tie, which only improves their chances of winning to 50 percent (or whatever the implied odds were from the pregame spread), because they still have to win in overtime. Down six and without any other choice, they get aggressive and optimize their play calling to try to score a game-winning touchdown.”

I’m trying to think of a decent poker analogy here (and struggling a little). Looking at it from the perspective of the team that is behind, being down a FG and playing for a tie would be like being short-stacked enough to fold your way into the money. Meanwhile being down six forces a team’s hand (so to speak), kind of like being too short to take the passive line of folding into the money and instead having to go into shove-or-fold mode.

That’s not really describing the perspective of the team that is ahead here, though, who makes a choice that seemingly provides a temporary benefit but isn’t the best decision long-term. That would be a little like risking too much to win a single tourney hand when doing so doesn’t really improve your chance at realizing the more substantial goal of winning the event.

All of which is to say, Pittsburgh’s choice to try a long field goal to go up six with less than two minutes to go -- a decision they ended making twice -- was at the very least questionable even if they’d had a more reliable kicker. And in fact, I tend to think it was just plain wrong (especially in the second instance).

I’m remembering as I write this a game from two years ago in which Pittsburgh similarly decided to try a long field goal with less than two minutes to go in a close contest. In that case the game was tied and the FG was 54 yards, i.e., a would-be career long for their then-kicker Shaun Suisham. Things went similarly badly for the Steelers there, too, and in a post here I surmised their chances of winning were decreased merely by the decision to kick a FG instead of punt.

Pittsburgh made some other bad choices, too, most glaringly with regards to a couple of fourth down calls in overtime. Indeed, I think last night it was obvious the team I’d picked had hurt their own chances of winning because of in-game decisions -- i.e., because of things they could control -- which definitely added to the pain of getting it wrong.

PS Gets the OK from NJ

My first thought last night upon hearing the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement had authorized Amaya to begin operating both PokerStars and Full Tilt in the Garden State was “finally.”

That such an announcement would be coming is something we began hearing not that long after New Jersey governor Chris Christie signed the state’s online gambling bill in late February 2013. Since then the likelihood of PokerStars’ return to the U.S. via Jersey has swung back and forth between just-around-the-corner to not-bloody-likely a few times before several hints over the summer punctuated by the phrase “end of the 3Q” made late September seem a real possibility again.

My second thought was that when news finally did arrive it coincidentally did so on the anniversary of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 being passed by the House and Senate (as noted in yesterday’s post). Something oddly symmetrical there, I suppose, given how the UIGEA’s history and that of PokerStars (and Full Tilt) have been intertwined over the last nine years.

After that I found myself less specifically thinking in generally positive terms about the news, not necessarily because of what will immediately come of it but rather how longer term the story of “U.S. Online Poker 2.0” will surely be a lot more interesting than it would have been otherwise. Felt like there was very little to look forward to before; now, perhaps, there are at least more possibilities, including more good ones for U.S. players wanting to play online.

That said, it’s been so long since U.S. Online Poker 1.0 -- an era that ended mid-April 2011 -- it is hard to think all that concretely about how last night’s news might conceivably lead to the reintroduction of the game online in more than just a few states here and there.

But it does feel a little like after enduring several orbits of garbage cards while sitting behind a dwindling stack, a hand with some potential has finally arrived. The attention is newly engaged, but the hand still has to be played skillfully. And luck still matters, too, going forward.