First Step for H.R. 6870, the Payments System Protection Act of 2008

The Payments System Protection Act of 2008 (H.R. 6870) has made it through the initial committee consideration and markup phase and thus remains on the table to be considered further by the rest of the House of Representatives.

The Poker Players Alliance (along with many others) have come out to say how pleased they are about Tuesday’s affirmative vote of the House Financial Services committee (30 ayes, 19 noes, 21 did not votes). In his statement, PPA Chairman and primary spokesperson Alfonse D’Amato congratulates the committee and says “we look forward to enactment of this sound public policy during this legislative session.”

I was unable to watch the hearing or vote on Tuesday, but have caught up a bit during the week. Head over to the PPA site for its selected coverage of the hearing, if yr into that sort of thing.

Looking more closely at the bill itself, H.R. 6870 certainly does seem like something online poker players should indeed be enthused about -- much more so that some of the other UIGEA-related bills that have been proposed over the last 18 months.

I mentioned H.R. 6870 in passing on Tuesday, expressing a bit of cynicism about the vagueness of its expressed intention “to ensure...[the UIGEA] does not cause harm to the payments system.” The bill itself, however, is quite clear in the way it expresses its purpose.

There are three sections. The first gives the bill its title.

The second section specifically prohibits the Secretary of the Treasure and the Board of Governers of the Federal Reserve System from finalizing those UIGEA regs, other than to “the extent as any such regulation pertains” to sports wagering (such as was already made illegal by the 1961 Wire Act) or to what the bill says in section 3. This is the section that makes online poker players happy, as it spells out that the UIGEA cannot specifically be used (right now, anyway) to make “financial transaction providers” stop us from sending money back and forth to online poker sites.

The third section looks to the future, providing a directive to the Secretary of the Treasury and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to keep studying all of this and “jointly develop and implement regulations...that shall include a definition of the term ‘unlawful internet gambling’...after conducting a full economic impact study of the propsed regulations.”

This little addendum, in fact, is where the title of the bill was taken. In essence, the charge to the feds here is for them to continue to try to assess how the UIGEA would affect the banking system should it be extended to apply to other forms of gambling than just sports wagering. What is only being implied here is that if it is determined extending the UIGEA to those other forms of online gambling would harm the banking system, then those additional regs wouldn’t be implemented. (That’s the vagueness I was talking about on Tuesday.)

As Pokerati Dan has alluded to a couple of times this week, the timing for the proposal of a bill called the “Payments System Protection Act” is perhaps fortuitous given the various crises that have recently befallen the stock market and, in particular, the American banking system. You probably heard about the government bailing out American International Group (AIG) this week, a company whose failure would gravely affect U.S. banks who are its clients. It certainly looks as though the payments system needs protectin’ these days....

By giving H.R. 6870 that title -- rather than, say, the “UIGEA Prohibition Act” or something (which is how H.R. 5767, which failed to get out of committee, was essentially presented) -- Frank emphasizes the dire practical consequences of the UIGEA as had been outlined quite extensively in that hearing back in April. A great strategy, really, to focus on how passing the bill will help alleviate stress on the banking system, and not to speak so directly of our rights to gamble online, an argument which never seems to appeal to a majority of legislators.

That change in emphasis may well help H.R. 6870 gather some momentum, although time is running out on this session. A bit amusing, actually, to see folks in the forums hoping it gets tacked onto some other “must-pass” legislation in the same way the UIGEA about this time two years ago. (Outrage at Bill Frist’s underhandedness there would surely be forgotten if the same tactics were used for our benefit, yes?)

That could happen, actually. In any case, we’re still a good ways away from seeing this thing through. Remember the song. We hope and pray that it will but today it is still just a bill.

Former UltimateBet Owners Face $75 Million Claim

Wow. Do you think report of this will reach the desk of the eleven-star general of the UB Army?

Kind of a double bombshell here. First, just the fact that MSNBC would be reporting on the Ultimate Bet/Absolute Poker scandals at all is of significance in and of itself.

We all know that 60 Minutes feature on the scandal(s) is coming in the not-too-distant future. And there have been a couple of other instances over the last year when major news media outlets did deign to give ’em a looksee, such as last October right after the AP scandal first hit the fan.

But generally speaking, there has been scant notice of the UB/AP brouhaha beyond our little, admittedly insular corner of the globule. You didn’t hear Norman Chad mention anything about it the other night on ESPN’s broadcast of Day 2 of this year’s Main Event, did you? And that was with both Phil Hellmuth (the face of UB) and Mark Seif (the face of AP) at the feature table!

As I have said before, even if some in the poker world would rather it all be kept hush-hush, I maintain that the mainstreaming of online poker scandals is a overall a very good thing.

But did you read the article? Mike Brunker reports that a $75 million claim is being made against the company that once owned and licensed software to UltimateBet. Apparently MSNBC has been in touch with a “court-appointed liquidator in charge of overseeing the voluntary dismemberment of Excapsa Software Inc. of Toronto, which formerly owned and licensed the poker software to UltimateBet and other gambling sites.”

Voluntary dismemberment. Aye-yi-yi.

Excapsa is, of course, the one-time owner of UltimateBet and Absolute Poker, who apparently sold the company in October 2006 -- right around the time the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was signed into law. That would be the “former” owners the current owners are blaming for all the trouble, even though cheating on the site continued until the beginning of 2008.

The article actually provides very few specifics regarding the claim. We are told that claim was filed by Blast-Off Ltd. of Malta -- i.e., the company that owns Absolute Poker that purchased UB back in 2006 -- but there’s nothing about the potential strength of the case or anything about a timeline moving forward. Nor is there any explanation of the significance of that $75 million figure, other than a reference to the liquidator saying “the amount of the claim did not directly correlate with the amount believed to have been stolen from UltimateBet players.”

After taking care of delivering that bit of news at the start, the bulk of the very lengthy (3,000-plus) word article provides a recap of the sordid AP/UB saga, chronicling the major events and players for an audience unfamiliar with the complex labyrinth of licentiousness and lies we’ve all been hearing about for over a year now.

It will be interesting to learn more about the claim itself, as well as to see what effect the news might have on UltimateBet. It could happen this bit of buying-off may help the current owners (and spokespersons) of UB further distance themselves from the scandal, given that Excapsa is the target here. And after all, in effect, this appears to be the new bosses suing the old bosses -- if appearances are to be trusted, anyway.

Then again, that caption under the picture of Hellmuth on the MSNBC site certainly doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the current regime: “Phil Hellmuth, the winningest player in the history of the World Series of Poker, makes a grand entry to this year's event in Las Vegas in his guise as general of the ‘Ultimate Bet Army.’ The company that owns UltimateBet.com has stated that players in high-stakes online poker games were victimized by a vast, long-running cheating scheme.”

Which is how it should be, frankly. No one should be that confident about UB, no matter how many stars Hellmuth has crazy-glued onto his helmet.

Deal and Shuffle Up

A couple of nights ago I helped live blog one of the final tables for the PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker. Haven’t done but a couple of those final tables thus far since I generally work the “first shift” -- i.e., the first 12 levels of a given tourney -- then my colleagues out on the left coast will take over from there. This was Day 2 of the $1,050 No-Limit Hold’em event that began with over 3,400 entrants, thereby creating a massive prize pool of more than $3.4 million.

For the one final table I did earlier in the WCOOP, that one had played out with nary a peep about chopping. This one was different, though, and those negotiations ended up being a highlight of covering the endgame.

I’ve watched final tables of big online events before -- even covering some of the big Sunday tournaments for PokerNews a good while back -- so I was already familiar with how, on Stars, for instance, the tournament director will step in and help moderate the terms of a deal once all of those left in the event express a willingness to do so. There was one funny bit that popped up the other night, though -- a little twist I hadn’t seen before -- that I thought you might find interesting.

Shortly after the tourney had gone five-handed, three of the remaining players -- the three shorter stacks -- all expressed a willingness to deal. But neither of the two chip leaders even said “no” in the chatbox, so they played on. After 20-30 more hands, though, the other two had come around and the tournament was paused as the deal was negotiated.

As frequently happens with these things, a “chip chop” was proposed and the moderator ran the numbers. Such a deal would reapportion the remaining prize money -- at that point an eye-popping $1,343,462.50, to be exact -- according to the chip stacks at the time the deal would be struck. This would mean no one would end up getting first-place money, which for this tournament was $468,045. But everyone would be getting better than fourth-place money ($178,550.50). And as PokerStars insists, $60,000 would be left “on the table” for the eventual winner.

In this case, it didn’t seem to me a deal was necessarily a no-brainer, as it sometimes can be. For instance, I was thinking about our tournament on Saturday, that PokerListings Run Good Challenge, and on the surface it would have a lot of sense for the top three in that one to have struck a deal to split the prize money instead of playing it out to see who got what. Since it was a turbo tourney with blinds increasing every five minutes, we were truly in “crapshoot” territory there at the end, and with such a steep climb between prizes ($960-$480-$160), it would’ve made sense when we were somewhat even just to say, hey, let’s chop this sucker up.

A couple of factors made that impossible for us even to consider, though: (1) we couldn’t pause the tourney, so in the time it would’ve taken simply to propose the idea and agree to it, the stack sizes would’ve changed considerably; (2) Dan from PokerListings was one of the final three, and whatever money he won was going to be rolled over into next week’s event, thus probably making it unfair to those playing in that event for us to deal for some of his winnings.

At the moment they were discussing the deal in the WCOOP tourney, the blinds were 125,000/250,000 (with a 25,000 ante), with the average stack being 10.45 million. That’s still 40-plus big blinds (though those antes were taking a significant bite, too), and in that tournament the levels lasted 30 minutes. Still a reasonable amount of play, frankly, which is why I thought perhaps they wouldn’t be dealing just yet.

However, four of the five quickly agreed to the “chip chop” terms. The one who didn’t asked for a little time to think about it. He was one of three shorter stacks, in third place overall, but sitting with only 7.9 million (compared to the 17-plus million the leader had). Finally, after a couple of minutes, he typed that he wanted an extra $20,000.

At first I chuckled a little at the request, but I quickly realized what he was doing. He was leveraging the others’ collective desire to get a deal done -- they had all seemed very willing -- and hoping they’d give in to his demand just to be able to guarantee themselves certain paydays. So he threw a number out there, easily divided by four. Maybe they’d all give him $5K from their stacks and they could then play it out...?

It was worth a shot. $20,000 is a lot of money -- more than those who’d finished as high as 13th in this event had made. But none of the other four were jumping to agree to such an idea. As the others hesistated, the chip leader made what I thought was a funny offer, an offer which essentially sunk the proposal, actually. He said he’d give a grand total $680 to the holdout. Why? Because he stood to get $340,680, and so he wanted to keep $340K and shoot for a $400K payday.

The chip leader’s underselling emboldened the others, I think, who shortly afterwards expressed their unwillingness to give the guy anything extra. Finally he realized his request wasn’t going to be granted, and so said he agreed to the “chip chop”...with one provision!

He wanted the $680, too.

To the chip leader’s credit, he quickly responded “i offered it...not gonna go back on it.” And so the holdout said, “okay, i accept with the 680.”

The deal having been made, the virtual shuffle began anew and the remaining five played it out. In fact the fellow in fifth place at the time of the deal ended up working his way back and winning the thing, taking another hour’s worth of play to do so.

Back on the beat today, and up until the WCOOP ends early next week. The prize pool for that finale -- Event No. 33, the $5,200 NLHE Main Event -- should be pretty huge. There’s a $10 million guarantee on it, which is probably the largest in online history.

Probably gonna see some dealing amid the deals at that final table next Monday, dontcha think?

What is Your Conceptual Continuity? (The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe)

Ended another six-day run of WCOOP live blogging yesterday. Day off today, then back to the grind tomorrow. Combined with my other “life” (which includes continuing to show up dutifully for my “real” job), Shamus is sapped.

Otherwise, I’d have lots on which to opine. I’d probably try (not necessarily successfully) to write something meaningful about the suicide last Friday of David Foster Wallace, author of The Broom of the System (1987), Infinite Jest (1996), and many other narrative delights.

Instead I’ll just send you over to Spaceman and the Poker Grump for their thoughts about Wallace’s untimely passing here in (what I think adds up to be) the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

And if the mental tank wasn’t so close to empty I’d also perhaps say something about what is happening this afternoon over in the House of Representatives, specifically the meeting of the House Financial Services Committee in which among other items on the agenda the committee will be “marking up” yet another newly-proposed bill from their chair, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) designed to counter the damage wrought by the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006.

This bill, titled the “Payment System Protection Act” (H.R. 6870), appears another attempt to pull off what Frank and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) had previously undertaken back in April with H.R. 5767. That bill was a very straightforward, very brief bill designed to prohibit the feds from finalizing any UIGEA regulations. It died in committee, though, toward the end of June.

The new bill is also quite brief and to the point, and is also designed to stop the feds from moving forward with the UIGEA. This time the tactic is slightly different, though, insofar as the bill doesn’t expressly prohibit the UIGEA regs from being finalized and implemented, but is asking the feds “To ensure that implementation of proposed regulations... does not cause harm to the payments system.”

Not quite sure how one exactly makes a law out of a directive like that, really, but like I said, I’m tired. Perhaps after the markup session (in which amendments to the bill may or may not be proposed and voted on) I’ll have the energy to talk more about this one.

Finally -- again, if I weren’t so bushed -- I might say something about the 2008 Bluff Magazine Reader’s Choice Awards (sic) currently ongoing, specifically regarding some of the selections they’ve listed (and not listed) for certain categories. Again, though, maybe I’ll just save that for later and for now just wonder why they would place the apostrophe there. What, they got only one reader? (To be fair, they get it correct elsewhere on the site.)

Talk about a lack of conceptual continuity. From suicide to punctuation. Plus yr odd Frank Zappa allusion, destined to baffle most, I’d guess. Ah, Wallace wouldn’t have minded, I don’t think...

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy...

Lucky Man

Played the second tourney in the PokerListings Run Good Challenge on Saturday. The tournament started at two in the afternoon. Unfortunately, I had to start covering the PokerStars WCOOP event that began at 2:30, and as I and my colleagues there have discovered, that tends to take up a lot of mental energy.

But as Viv Savage, keyboardist for Spinal Tap, once said, ”Yeah, I've got two hands here.”

Like last week, the tourney was again no-limit hold’em, although this time we were playing a turbo format (i.e., five-minute levels). Given the breakneck structure, I remember thinking as the first hand was dealt I could very well be done before 2:30, anyway.

Matt Showell and the PokerListings guys came up with that name -- the ”Run Good Challenge” -- and it particularly applied to this event. While there are certainly better and worse approaches to turbo tourneys (i.e., there is some skill involved), one generally needs a lot of luck and/or good timing, too, to get anywhere in ’em. As it happened, I had both.

There were three key hands for me that determined my fate (and that of some others), all of which went my way.

The first came right near the end of Level 4. The blinds were already 50/100, and in a couple of hands would bump up to 75/150. After having built up to 1,900 or so early on, I had slipped back to 1,570 when the following hand took place. I was sitting in the cutoff where I’d been dealt . It folded to me, and I put in a raise to 300. (I might’ve raised with anything here.) Folded over to the Wicked Chops entity who reraised all in for 795 total. You can figure out the odds here and a short-stack’s possible range yourself. I called, and Chops showed . Luckily for me, a deuce flopped and my set survived. I now had over 2,500, tops at my table.

The second fortunate hand came after we’d consolidated to the final table. This one came in Level 8 (blinds 150/300, antes 25), about 35-40 minutes into the tournament. By this point the WCOOP had gotten cranked up and I was becoming increasingly distracted by the half-dozen windows I had open in order to live blog the sucker. (Ended up writing a few posts while playing, actually.) So I’d been folding a lot of hands, basically just hoping to catch a good starter and push. I had 1,740 chips -- actually was third out of the six players remaining (though not by much) -- when I picked up in the cutoff. It folded to me, I shoved, and after a few seconds of considerin’ chip leader Dan from PokerListings called from the small blind with .

I liked how the situation looked until the flop came . Ugh. What’s that, ten outs now for Dan? Then the came on the turn. Oh, dear. I was wishing I had his hand. But the river was the , and I’d survived. “How do i miss that," typed Dan. “Bulletproof,” answered Dr. Pauly. I was up to 3,730.

The third instance of good-timing came when we were four-handed in Level 9 (blinds 200/400, antes 50). After folding a bunch of hands I was down to 2,880 -- ahead of Pauly but behind Change100 and Dan – when I got in the under the gun-slash-cutoff seat. I thought a beat, then minimum-raised to 800. Change also took a moment before reraising to 2,800. The blinds folded, I stuck the 2,830 I had left in the middle, and Change called, showing .

“Boo,” said Change. Like I say, good timing for me there. The rockets held up and I was in good shape to cash.

A short-stacked Pauly went out shortly thereafter, followed by Change in third. When heads-up began Dan had me outchipped just about 2-to-1 (12,095 to 5,905). I didn’t play the heads-up portion particularly well, in my opinion, though did somehow grab the chip lead briefly. Overall, though, Dan was the aggressor and deservedly took it down. (Check out Dan’s blog for his discussion of heads-up.)

Nice little payday there ($480) for just under one hour’s worth of play. And I believe I have now picked up enough leaderboard points to secure a spot in the fourth and final tourney scheduled later in the month.

Additionally, since Dan from PokerListings is not eligible for the cabbage, this week’s first place money gets rolled over yet again to next week’s tournament (a combined NLHE/PLO event, I believe). That means some huge prizes for those who make it into the top three next Saturday.

I suppose, then, I wasn’t the only lucky one.

Listening

There’s a nifty passage in Eudora Welty’s autobiographical One Writer’s Beginnings in which she talks about what she experiences when reading. I especially like it because of how it actually does something interesting to those of us who read the passage -- as though we, too, get to experience (momentarily, anyway) exactly what Welty is describing.

Here is the passage:

“Ever since I was first read to, then started reading myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. Is isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice.”

As you read that (silently to yourself, I would guess), didn’t you become self-conscious about whether or not you “heard” that “voice” she is describing? Did you hear it?

She goes on to talk about how this capacity to hear the “voice of the story or the poem itself” or “reader-voice” or whatever you want to call it may well be tied to her being a writer. Welty lived a long, long life (90-plus years) and wrote many novels and stories, and so perhaps was one of those people who is better equipped than most of us to “hear” what a book might be saying.

This passage gets excerpted and anthologized sometimes under the title “Listening.” I see all sorts of possible ways of interpreting this passage, but they all tend to come back to the simple notion of paying attention while you read -- of really listening to what the author is trying to say in a way that allows the book to “speak” to you in some fashion.

It is certainly possible to read without “listening.” I know sometimes I do it, and thus unlike Welty there have been many, many lines I have read in my life that I didn’t “hear.” I might sometimes be able to blame the author -- if the book isn’t interesting or well-written, I may well drift away, for sure. But then there are times when I’m just distracted, and no matter how good the quality of writing or insight, that “reader-voice” is mostly silent.

That one can draw an analogy here with what goes on at the poker table should be obvious to anyone who has read thus far, I’d think. Anyone who has been listening, anyway.

Some of us listen all the time at the table. Some of us can only do so now and then. And some of us don’t ever listen. That Full Tilt Poker commercial with Jennifer Harman -- you’ve seen it, the “Speak to me, buddy” one -- kind of dramatizes what we’re talking about here, I think. If you haven’t seen it, here it is:



As the commercial demonstrates, by “listening” we ain’t strictly talking about what we physically hear. There is an inward voice -- the voice of the hand, I suppose -- which we want to hear. You pay attention and your attention pays you.

Hey, listen up: Have a good weekend, everybody!

Moonlighting

That is the word for it. Shamus in the shadows. Playing it straight by day, living out a second, secret self at night.

Was on the World Series of Online Poker Event No. 11 yesterday, the $320 pot-limit Omaha/8 event. Goofy game. And not so simple to report, either. Big, split pots are frequent (and anticlimactic to report). And the big, scooped pots -- often report-worthy -- are usually not a little bit arduous to recount and explain.

One big difference between reporting online tourneys and live ones is the sheer amount of information one gets online. (Not to mention the speed with which that bombardment occurs.) Spaceman did a good job detailing this phenomenon -- and other relevant factors affecting the pursuit of one’s goal here -- in a post from earlier this week. Kind of makes it seem disingenuous to summarize a hand when you have every single detail at yr disposal there in a hand history.

Hell, on PokerStars you can even reanimate the sucker again and again, if you’d like. You could turn a single hand into a regular little novella, if you wanted. Was joking with one of my colleagues early on how nice it would have been at the WSOP had we been able just to click a replayer and get the players to do it again.

Best part of the evening was eavesdropping on the incessant chat over at Barry Greenstein’s table. A constant stream of questions for the Bear, from both railbirds and tablemates. And from what I could tell, Greenstein answered every one, no matter how silly or personal. One even asked how old he was when he’d lost his virginity. “Still holding out,” responded Greenstein cheekily.

Back on tonight (and for the next several days, too). Maybe when it’s all over a couple of weeks from now I’ll have more to say. No time right now, though. Big pot brewing over on Table 106.

Kudos

Played a tiny bit of online poker yesterday, having a small window of opportunity on a rare day off from blogging PokerStars’ World Championship of Online Poker.

That PokerListings Run Good Challenge continues next Saturday with another no-limit hold’em tourney, this time using a turbo format. So instead of playing my usual PLO cash game -- which, in fact, I haven’t played at all for the last week -- I decided to join a little 18-player sit-n-go to practice.

Stumbled a bit early, but righted myself (largely by winning an all-in coin flip, admittedly) and was there with five players to go and a less than average stack (in fourth). Even though I was low on chips, I liked my chances as both of two chip leaders seemed on the passive side. The fellow in third place was a bit tricky, although as it turned out I didn’t tangle with him much during the endgame.

Meanwhile, the table’s short-stack (to my left) was absolutely refusing to play a single hand, folding a good 25 in a row. Then he took a chance calling all in with a flush draw and one card to come and he hit it. That made me the shorty. A couple of hands later, I raised with Q-Q, he shoved, and I called. He had A-K. Flop J-T-x, but an ace on the turn (and no king on the river), and I was bubble boy. Again!

Which is why I’m playing $5.50 SNGs. For now I’ll leave the big buy-in tourneys to people like Haley and Pojo, both of whom cashed this week in WCOOP events.

Haley made a nice run in the 8-game event (known around these parts as “S.P.L.E.N.D.O.R.”); she writes a bit about it here. Pojo’s cash was yesterday in the 4-max no-limit hold’em event, where he was among the chip leaders for a while there early on. (I noticed at one break -- about four or five hours into the thing, I think -- he was in 11th place.) I was watching when he sent PokerStars pro Dario Minieri to the rail, the little guy’s scarf flappin’ in the wind behind him. Then he got moved to Hevad Khan’s table and held his own against that PS pro, too. Nice work, you two.

I’m sure I have other buds out there who are playing these events and I don’t know about it. (If so, tell me!) I mentioned last week how terrific (and unique) these structures are for the WCOOP events. Half-hour levels, for the most part, with the blinds/antes rising more gradually than you normally find in even the slower online tourneys. And the fields are massive, thus routinely making for big prize pools, too.

Covering the tourneys -- and reading all of these tourney-centric books -- is definitely making me want to play ’em more often. And perhaps lift my ambitions a bit beyond these tiny buy-in donkaments. Will be putting those thoughts on the back-burner for now, though, as my next day off from the WCOOP is a good ways down the road.

Good luck to all who are playing. You know I’ll be watching.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Busy, busy, busy. I mentioned last week how I’m helping out with the live blogging of PokerStars’ World Championship of Online Poker. Worked the last four days straight, covering four different events.

Thus far I’ve partnered with fellow bloggers Drizz (Nickle and Dimes), April (This Is Not a Poker Blog), Tuscaloosa Johnny (Poker Nation), and Otis (Up for Poker). All cool cats with whom I’m very glad to be working.

Was kind of a late one last night, so I expect I’ll be dragging some today. Fact is, I’m essentially working two full-time jobs at the moment. I like ’em both, though, so I ain’t complainin’.

Speaking of living out multiple existences, I wanted to share one small observation today inspired by something I heard on Bart Hanson’s Cash Plays. In the car yesterday I happened to listen to Hanson’s interview with Allen “Chainsaw” Kessler from a couple of weeks back (the 8/27/08 episode). Not gonna get into Kessler’s character or anything really having to do with him -- although he is certainly an interesting case. Rather, I just wanted to share something he mentioned about Phil Ivey that caused me to brood briefly over the issue of self-identity and poker.

Kessler played with Ivey back in Atlantic City in the early 90s, mostly Stud/8 and Omaha/8. Hanson asked him some questions about those days, including asking Kessler what he thought of Ivey’s game back then. “He played great,” said Kessler without hesitation. “He always played great?” asked Hanson, a note of incredulity in his voice. “Or do you remember when he was bad?”

Kessler said no, he didn’t remember Ivey ever playing badly, at least when he played with him (when Ivey was in his early 20s). “No, I don’t remember…like I don’t remember him as that ‘Jerome’ or any of that stuff. He must have already been past that.”

The reference to “Jerome” there is, of course, to the pseudonym Ivey played under when he was legally too young to play in casinos. In order to play, Ivey used a fake ID with the name “Jerome Graham,” and he has talked in interviews about how everyone in Atlantic City knew him as Jerome until he turned 21. Hanson’s questions seem to imply that “Jerome” wasn’t the consistently stellar player Phil Ivey is, as does Kessler’s reference to those earlier days (before he played with him) as perhaps corresponding to what Hanson was alluding with his follow-up question.

It occurred to me hearing Kessler refer to how Ivey had “already been past that” earlier phase in his life and poker playing career in which he was known as “Jerome” that every poker player goes through similar phases in his or her development. In other words, we all have memories of earlier versions of ourselves as poker players, and in most cases those earlier versions are probably much different from the idea we have of ourselves today.

And, at some point, we probably all had to get “past that” earlier self in order to improve -- or at least endure -- as poker players.

What do you recall of that former self? Wouldn’t it be great to play him or her heads-up?

In Which It Is Demonstrated Why Pocket Jacks Are Sometimes Called “Hooks”

So we played this little blogger event on Saturday, the PokerListings Run Good Challenge. By invite only. A nifty little freeroll with some decent cabbage for those who finish in the top three ($600/$300/$100). Only 12 were invited, and of those only 11 showed up (I think the “Entities” from Wicked Chops missed it). And Pokerati Dan also came too late to make anything happen, and so we were really starting with 10. A decent shot at some money, no matter how you look at it. Of course, as the name suggests, it would help to run good.

I’m hardly playing these no-limit hold’em tourneys at all these days, but as I’ve mentioned the last few weeks I have been reading quite a bit and so had some ideas swimming around in the ol’ cerebral stew about how I was a-gonna approach this sucker. Wasn’t terribly confident going in, but once things got started I quickly felt better, realizing I might’ve actually picked up a thing or two from my reading. Books are our friends.

To give you an idea how it went for me, I took a peek after all was said and done at my stats and discovered I’d managed to claim a ton of pots without showing. Out of 35 pots I won, PokerStars is actually saying I’d only shown three times the entire event. (That was of 130 hands total.) Not quite sure if that’s entirely accurate, but I do know I was avoiding the showdowns pretty much throughout.

Grabbed a medium-sized pot early to push out to 1,900 or so when everyone else was still hovering around the starting 1,500, and that gave me room to operate a little more freely and accumulate a bit. Maneuvered my way up over the 3,000-chip mark before the first hour was up, which had me in second or third place for most of those first four levels. During that time we’d lose Change100 and Matt from PokerListings, and just after the one-hour break the nine players remaining were consolidated onto one table. My opponents: Dr. Pauly, Amy Calistri, Kid Dynamite, Michele Lewis, the Poker Shrink, Spaceman, Poker Listings Dan, and Pokerati Dan.

At that point I had a little less than 3,000 in chips, which in fact put me in second behind the current leader, Poker Listings Dan, the strategy writer over at PokerListings, who had approximately twice that. It was at that point where I feel like I played only so-so poker, folding for a couple of orbits when I probably could have gotten involved a time or two. Was trying to gauge the table, though.

Finally at the start of Level 6 (blinds 100/200), I got active again. And players started busting. First Pokerati Dan, who’d blinded all of the way down to 95 chips before playing his first hand, got bounced. (“I played too tight,” said Dan in chat from the rail.) Then the Poker Shrink.

Then a short-stacked Dr. Pauly put a brutal beat on Kid Dynamite when he shoved his last 1,655 with the hammer (7-2) and got called by the Kid who held . The flop was benign, but the turn and river both came deuces, and the Kid was crippled. He’d go out in seventh, followed soon thereafter by the Spaceman (6th) and Amy (5th).

At four-handed (the money bubble), I was again in second place with roughly the same stack (3,160) I had when the final table started, a bit less than half of what Dan Skolovy had. After a dozen hands or so, I had held steady, but Dr. Pauly had snuck ahead of me, having about 4,200. Self-proclaimed “last woman sitting” was Michele Lewis with about 2,000.

Then came this hand. I’m a-gonna tell you what happened, but I offer it to all-a-you well-versed MTTers as a “what would you do?”

I’m on the button with 3,460 and get dealt . Blinds are still 100/200. Dan from Poker Listings, who has 6,785, raised to 600 from UTG/the cutoff. Now Dan is the head strategy writer over there at the PL, and we’d all already picked up that one key part of his strategy was either to raise or fold preflop, and almost never limp. So when he raises there, his range is fairly wide, I’m thinking. Probably has a better than average hand to raise my button, but not necessarily something better than pocket jacks.

Here’s where I ask you, what would you do?

Folding seemed weak. Calling with position might’ve been a good choice here, but if an ace, king, or queen flops -- more likely than not -- and Dan bets out, I’ve got a tough decision. If I call, the pot would be 1,200, and I’d have 2,860 left.

I decided I wanted to raise, and given my stack size figured I couldn’t make a real raise without pushing all in. So I did. Pauly and Michele folded, and Dan took a few seconds before calling and turning over . I was surprised he’d call with that, but elated that I was 70-30 to win here. (Do you call in that spot? What, really, could my range be there?)

Alas, an ace flopped, I couldn’t catch up, and I was out on the bubble.

So while I brood a little about how I might’ve folded into the money, Dan from Poker Listings eliminated Michele in 3rd on the very next next hand, then after 130 hands of back-and-forthing with Pauly would take first. That means the first-place prize money gets rolled over into the next tourney (this coming Saturday), although I’m not sure how it’ll be distributed.

My consolation prize: I get some leaderboard points for finishing in the top six. After three weeks of this, those who end up in the top six get to play a fourth freeroll the last Saturday of the month.

And I guess another consolation prize is the feeling that, for the most part, I played a tournament well. Congrats to Dan, Pauly, and Michele! And thanks again to PokerListings for the invite -- was a ton of fun, for sure.