Shamus in Vegas: Episode 1 -- Prelude

Back home. Landed late Sunday afternoon. Safe, sound. Didn’t want to give those three hours back, but so it goes.

Vera and I had fun Saturday hanging out at the Bellagio in the morning and afternoon. The World Poker Tour World Championship got underway there at noon. That’s the big $25,000 buy-in event that usually brings out all the big names and familiar faces.

And there were several recognizable folks there in the Fontana Room for Day 1a, including Andy Bloch, Erik Seidel, Hoyt Corkins, Mike Sexton, Shane Schleger, Jon “PearlJammer” Turner, Vivek Rajkumar, Joe Sebok, Amnon Filippi, David Chiu, David Williams, Mike Matusow, David “Chino” Rheem, Michael DiMichele, Daniel Alaei, David Grey, Nenad Medic, Isaac Haxton, Doug Lee, John Phan, and Scott Montgomery. Those are just the ones I spotted immediately among what looked like around 150 players or so seated during the first level. Looks like after the second Day 1 they ended up with 337 entrants overall.

We took off in the middle of the afternoon, although I’d come back to the Bellagio later for some interviewing. Meanwhile, Vera had her own stargazing to do over at the Thomas & Mack Center, where she met and got photographed with one of the night’s featured competitors, Steffen Peters. I made it back over to the T&M before the World Cup Dressage Final got underway at seven.

We had seats up in the second level, but were able to move down to a more choice location in the first level just before the initial ride of the night. Was a good time, with the crowd (and Vera) being especially pleased when the American Peters and his horse Ravel won the World Cup with a huge score of 84.95.

Flight home was a little bumpy during one short stretch, but easy enough overall. I finished The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy, a book that came highly recommended to me. I appreciated what McCarthy was up to, though to be honest I never did connect very well with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Also finished Jim Thompson’s short pulp novel The Criminal (1953), which I liked much better.

Gonna revisit the trip in a few posts this week, I think. In the following manner:

Episode 2 -- What’s Your Plan?

Want to say a few things about my brief session at Binion’s and the Wednesday Poker Discussion Group that followed. The Poker Grump, there with me at the WPDG, has already written some about that meeting here.

Episode 3 -- Food for Thought

On two meals I ate with writers: dinner with some poker bloggers (F-Train, BWoP, Cardgrrl, Poker Grump) on Wednesday night & lunch with a couple of poker authors (Al Schoonmaker and Jim Brier) on Thursday.

Episode 4 -- I Just Want to See What You Have

Here I’ll focus on the only other session I played at the Gold Coast on Thursday. A few interesting hands in there, I think.

Episode 5 -- Finding Yr Calling

Will wrap up with a word or three about my visit to the Center for Gaming Research at UNLV, shooting the breeze Friday afternoon with Pokerati Dan, and Saturday at the Bellagio and the World Cup.

Was a lot of fun, but glad to be back. Stay tuned.

I Would Need GPS to Find Memory Lane

Had a good visit on Friday over at UNLV with David Schwartz, Director of the Center for Gaming Research. Perused the collections for a bit, as well. Want to research a project related to gambling, Vegas, poker? The CGR is the place to go.

Made it over to the Wynn a little later in the afternoon where I met with Pokerati Dan Michalski for a couple of hours. Kind of a comical situation, caused by my absent-mindedness. I forgot to carry my cell phone to our meeting, meaning I was “off the grid” for a while. A bit worrisome, as I was supposed to be getting a call from Vera regarding our dinner plans.

When I finally got up with Dan (who, of course, had been calling me repeatedly to try to switch our meeting place), he let me use his phone to call Vera. That’s when I realized I couldn’t remember Vera’s phone number, which I never dial because it is programmed into my cell. No problem. I’ll just call someone who knows Vera’s number. I thought of a few possibilities, but realized I couldn’t recall their numbers either. Finally I found a number way back in a dusty corner of my ever-withering brainstuff and all was well.

Dan and I hoofed it over to the Encore Lobby Bar and Café where we ordered some light fare. Had fun talking blogs and the poker media, the upcoming WSOP, and the meaning of life while hounding the wait staff to bring us more than three pieces of pita bread at a time for the hummus. We walked back over to the Wynn where I left Dan at the poker room where he was going to try to join a no-limit game.

In the evening Vera and I ended up over at Caesars Palace having dinner with some friends at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, followed by some high-priced gelato and some gawking at the tropical fish in that big 50,000-gallon Atlantis aquarium.

Today it is off to the Bellagio where Day 1a of the World Poker Tour World Championship kicks off. Vera and I will be hanging out there this morning and afternoon, then tonight it is the big dressage finale of the Fédération Équestre Internationale World Cup.

Then we fly home tomorrow. Here’s hopin’ I remember to pack my cell phone.

Good Eats and Comfortable Seats

Another fun one yesterday, marked by good eats and comfortable seats. With regard to the latter, I’m referring to the seats you find at both kinds of tables -- the ones where you chow down and the ones where you play cards.

After some breakfast at the hotel and a quick shopping excursion with Vera, she went back for more dressage at the World Cup and I took off to meet Al Schoonmaker and Jim Brier for lunch. We met up over at the Palms where Dr. Al treated Jim and me to the buffet. Had a blast.

Most poker people are probably aware of Dr. Al thanks to his four books concentrating on various psychological issues in poker: The Psychology of Poker, Your Worst Poker Enemy, Your Best Poker Friend, and Poker Winners Are Different. Jim Brier is perhaps less immediately familiar to most, although a few years back he co-authored a well-regarded book with Bob Ciaffone called Middle Limit Hold’em Poker. He also contributed significantly enough to a book by British poker author Byron Jacobs called How Good is Your Limit Hold’em? to be listed on the cover as a collaborator, too. Both especially nice guys. And smart, too.

We discussed a number of different topics during our hour-and-a-half together, including the history of the Wednesday Poker Discussion Group (which dates back to 1999) and its Monday no-limit hold’em-focused offshoot, limit versus no-limit hold’em, risk aversion (and how all three of us had it), the many treasures awaiting bonus and promotion-hunters in Vegas, artificial intelligence and the future prospects for “poker bots,” and the upcoming World Series of Poker.

Dr. Al was nice enough to give me a copy of the one of his four books I didn’t own, and we parted making plans to keep in touch, perhaps at more meetings this summer when in all likelihood I’ll be back in Vegas covering the WSOP.

I thought I would try to squeeze in a short session, though since I played at the Palms several times last summer I wanted to sit down somewhere new. So I hopped in the rental and motored across Flamingo Rd. to the Gold Coast to see if perhaps they had anything at all going on. I’d tried once last summer to play there, but all they had happening then was one full table of old-timers, none of whom seemed ready to budge for another decade or so. Didn’t look much better yesterday, although there were some folks lingering to try to get a second table going, and thanks to some extra effort from the staff we ended up making one happen.

We started three-handed -- fairly absurd, really, although with only a one-dollar rake if the pot reached $10 and just a single blind, it could’ve been a lot worse. And, as it turned out, we only had to play a few hands of that before the table started filling. By the time I left we’d been eight- or nine-handed for a good while. I did pretty well, actually, leaving exactly $45 up for an hour of “work.”

There were a couple of characters in there worth sharing. There was the drinker. Four Captain ’n Cokes during our hour together, and more coming. “I’m not here for a long time, I’m here for a good time,” he said. And random-comment lady. “The coffee isn’t that bad, is it?” she once asked, with no coffee anywhere in sight. And a couple of semi-interesting hands, too. Will talk about ’em next week.

I suppose it might seem silly to some to read about my squeezing in an hour of $2/$4 limit hold’em rather than pursue more potentially lucrative opportunities during my short while here. Fact is, I get so little chance to play live I just don’t feel a special desire to test myself unnecessarily. One nice effect of putting in some hands like this at the lowest limits is that I do feel much, much more confident just dealing with the mechanics of live play than I did even a year ago.

Yeah, I know. Confidence ain’t gonna help but so much at the lowest limits like this. Hell, even skill is only gonna be of marginal benefit at a lot of these tables, where eight-handed flops means you gotta showdown winners or lose, end of story. But I tend to think what I’m doing now is gonna help me down the road, should I venture into higher stakes, tourneys, etc. As we were talking about a lunch a little bit, stepping out of one’s comfort zone ain’t a simple matter.

Came on back to the hotel to decompress a bit before going out for dinner. Later on, Vera and I ventured over to the Hard Rock for a loud dinner at the Pink Taco. The shrimp tacos were quite scrumptious, in fact. And soporific. We wandered around the casino in a daze for a bit afterwards. Looked in on the poker room, where two no-limit tables were filled with players while sixteen more collected dust in the distance. Got back to our hotel and crashed, sleeping soundly despite the planes roaring overhead from nearby McCarran.

Like I say, I’ll have more to write about all of this next week. Today the plan is to visit with David Schwartz over at UNLV and check out the Special Collections at the Center for Gaming Research. Then will be getting together with Pokerati Dan later in the afternoon. Not sure what else is on the agenda as yet. Will probably post something tomorrow, too, so we’ll all find out.

Sleep is for Suckers

First day in Vegas was fairly packed. Vera and I landed at McCarran around 10 a.m. local time. Grabbed a bite and I dropped off Vera at the World Cup around noon. I then headed over to Binion’s and ended up sitting at a $2/$4 limit table for about an hour or so, killing time before the meeting of the Wednesday Poker Discussion Group that was scheduled to start around two o’clock.

The Poker Grump came over and was there to see me finally hit a nice hand to get back close to even. Then I racked ’em up and we headed over to the coffee shop for the meeting. Thing didn’t get going in earnest until about three-ish, by which time 25 or so folks had gathered. Was a very fun couple of hours, highlighted by a lengthy analysis of a single $2/$5 no-limit hold’em cash game hand played at the Wynn by one of the group.

Operated a little bit like a class, with discussion leaders and several gifted “students” piping up with their ideas along the way. Lots of insights and entertainment, too, and it seemed like there were several moments when folks delivered lines about the player’s approach that were simultaneously uproarious and perceptive: e.g., “You got him right where he wanted you.”

From there I got back together with Vera, then as planned we met up with the Poker Grump, Cardgrrl, BWoP, and F-Train over at the Grand Lux Cafe at the Venetian for dinner, where we had a good time sharing stories and marveling at the absurdly-large size of our dishes (“That Chicken Parmesan is bigger than yr head!”).

Didn’t get to sleep ’til midnight or so -- 3 a.m. my time -- and, of course, woke way too early this morning. Tired but wired, ready for more.

Today I am having lunch with a couple of poker authors, Alan Schoonmaker and Jim Brier, both of whom have published multiple poker books and many, many articles in Card Player and elsewhere. Brier’s articles and books are on the strategy side (mostly on limit hold’em, I believe), while Schoonmaker’s are more about the psychology of poker. Should be pretty interesting to be in the middle of those two today.

Might be meeting up with others today, too, but don’t know yet for sure. And could be playing again somewheres, if the timing is right. Will likely have dinner with Vera and some dressage people tonight, then tomorrow it is off to visit the collections at the Center for Gaming Research at UNLV.

Gotta sign off now. Am taking notes, natch, and plan to write up a more detailed trip report next week. Wish you were here.

Destination Vegas

Vegasward we go. Not much time to talk.

A quick trip, this, arriving later this morning and leaving Sunday afternoon. The 2009 Fédération Équestre Internationale World Cup Finals is happening. That’s dressage, folks. Comes to Vegas every odd-numbered year (is in Europe for the evens). As mentioned here before, Vera Valmore rides, and so she’ll be there watching most of the dressage events. Vera and I were there in ’07, as documented in these here “Shamus in Vegas” posts.

I’ll be at the big finale on Saturday, though will be occupied with several other activities before then.

Have various items on the agenda already. Gonna try to make the Wednesday Poker Discussion Group over at Binion’s with the Poker Grump. Plan on checking out the collections over at the Center for Gaming Research at UNLV later in the week. Might take a quick trip over to the Gamblers Book Shop, as I usually try to do whenever in LV. Have plans to be there at the Bellagio on Saturday as the World Poker Tour Championship kicks off, where I’ll be meeting up with various pokery people. Also looking forward to hanging out some with F-Train, BWoP, Cardgrrl, Pokerati Dan, and maybe B.J. Nemeth if I can track him down. There are probably others there, too, I should hope to find this week.

Oh, and I may well be playing a little poker here and there, too. We’ll see.

Anyhow, I expect to be all wired while there and so will report back soon. Talk to you again from the middle of the desert.

Laurel, Hardy & Me

The PokerStars Spring Championship of Online Poker wrapped up yesterday, as did my work helping cover the sucker. As was the case last September with WCOOP, it was again a lot of fun to be scribblin’ alongside and collaboratin’ with a good group of folks. Am glad to have it in the rearview, though, as the frequent late nights (sometimes ’til sunrise) screwed with the sleep schedule a bit more than yr cranky gumshoe would’ve liked (or had necessarily anticipated). Goes with the territory, of course.

Have been so busy with SCOOPing I haven’t had a lot of time to think about this here Vegas trip I have coming up this week. Will say a little more about that tomorrow, which is the day Vera Valmore and I will be flying out. Have a lot of stuff planned, though, including meeting up with various blogger types and others. Like I say, stay tuned.

Wanted to write just a little today about my recent online play. Had built up the online roll a bit and moved to $1/$2 limit hold’em a while back where things were going just swimmingly for three weeks or so. Too swimmingly, really, as my win rate had climbed to a gawdy 6 BB/100 hands or something there for a while before finally settling back down into a more realistic range. Then came a nasty little crash over the last few days which ended yesterday with me doing what I did back in December and just cashing out a big chunk o’ change in disgust.

So I’m back to just a few hundy to play with online, meaning I’ll have to head back down in stakes again in order to manage the bankroll correctly. I might even get away from LHE a bit and explore some other games and tourneys in an effort to try to keep poker fun here in the near term. Try some of that change I was yapping about in my last post.

What happened yesterday was another quick, painful sequence of bad timing, misfortune, and a bit of what Ian Taylor and Matthew Hilger in The Poker Mindset refer to as “passive tilt.” That’s when you react to a bad session by starting to expect the worst (e.g., believing your opponent will always hit that draw), and thus go into “check/call mode when faced with any aggression from your opponents unless you have an extremely strong hand.”

The authors explain how unlike other, more obvious forms of tilt (when you know you’re tilting), passive tilt can often operate somewhere below conscious thought, and thus “can go undetected for a considerable period of time, especially when triggered by simply running badly.” I’m pretty sure this is what I have been dealing with the last few days, and I’m going to point to one moment in particular from yesterday’s session that kind of woke me up to what was going on.

I came to a new table and within a few hands immediately recognized the player on my left to be an especially weak opponent, doing a lot of limping and calling, showing down subpar hands, and being exploited by a couple of other, more tutored players at the table. I ended up getting into at least three hands with this player in which I lost big pots after he hit unlikely draws on the end (e.g., rivering five-outers to make two pair, filling gutshots, etc.). Then, as often happens in this situation, the guy ended up giving it all back very quickly to the rest of the table, went busto, then left.

So my mood wasn’t ideal. There were at least two very good players at the table, and since we were six-handed that meant I probably should’ve just left, too, and found an easier spot. But being down, I was stubborn about it and so stuck around.

That’s when I noticed the guy on my right was three-betting preflop every single time the player two to my left open-raised. I kept picking up winners like 7-4-offsuit, so I was folding out of those hands, of course. But it was getting obvious: the guy on my right for some reason had decided to try to isolate the other player whenever possible.

Finally those two started going at it in the chat box as well, and the gist of their conversation was that each believed the other to be a terrible player. I won’t rehearse the whole debate, other than to say there was a lot of rancor over a two-outer or nine-outer (they couldn’t decide) which one had hit against the other some time earlier. Silly stuff.

Then comes a hand in which I pick up in the cutoff. Player to my right, Laurel, raises. I three-bet. Folds to Hardy in the big blind who cold-calls, and Laurel calls as well. Flop comes a worrisome . Laurel checks, Hardy bets, I raise, and both call. The turn is the , and when both check I overcome my passive-tilty-what-if-I’m-beat fretting and bet. Both call.

The river is the . Passive tilt or not, I ain’t gonna be raising anymore on this one, I don’t think. Laurel checks, Hardy bets, I call, and Laurel check-raises. Ugh. Hardy just calls, though, so I only have to sacrifice one more bet to see this through, which I do.

Laurel shows . A boat on the river. Hardy shows . A straight. Neat. I’ve finished the hand in third place. I don’t bother to figure out what-outer it took to beat me. Neither do they.

Apologies for the bad beat story (or SIGH), but I share it mainly to say that the hand -- along with the two players’ bickering beforehand -- woke me up out of my listless, unprofitable funk and got me to the Cashier’s page. In that hand, from beginning to end, I was essentially overwhelmed by the feeling that there was no way I was gonna win it. Which is no way to operate, fer damn sure.

As was the case in December, cashing out a big chunk had an immediately beneficial effect on my overall mood. Time to regroup once again.

But first, Vegas! More tomorrow on that.

(EDIT [added 11:00 a.m.]: Just happened to notice Barry Tanenbaum posted something yesterday on a related topic, “Passive Play When Tired.”)

The Ever-Present Existential Struggle With Change

Many have noted before how poker is a game that tends to reveal certain aspects of a person’s character. Players play according to so many different styles because, well, people are different. They view the world differently. They view themselves differently. And poker helps to make all those differences much more conspicuous.

A person comes to the table with certain ideas. Meets a group of others, all of whom have their own way of understanding this mortal coil about which we individually wind. They’re all exposed to that chance element -- the cards -- and how they differently respond provides the foundation for the ensuing conflict of ideas. Eventually, each starts to understand how the others look at things, with some picking up on such more quickly than others.

Anthony Holden described the phenomenon in Big Deal (1990) as follows: “Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped bare at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life.”

Holden’s line gets quoted a lot, and while the leap from “loser in cards” to loser “in life” probably skips over a few necessary steps, it does nevertheless make a valid point. A big part of one’s success in poker has to do with seeing oneself as clearly and accurately as others do. You can’t win if others understand what you are doing better than you do. Which happens -- to all of us when we first start to play poker, and to most of us even after we’ve been playing for a long while. We get lazy, we stop paying attention to ourselves, we stop paying attention to how others are seeing our “character stripped bare.” And when that happens, we lose. Usually.

Sorry to be so abstract here, but I’m getting to a sort of mini-epiphany I had over the last few days that concerns both my poker playing style and my character, generally speaking.

I am probably best classified as one of those “creatures of habit” types who generally has a hard time changing my routine once I find something that I like or at least is comfortable enough to endure without too much hardship. That’s not to say I am not able to adapt to changes that go on around me, but rather that I myself am less inclined to introduce such changes if not forced to do so.

This character trait gets illustrated in various ways, some relatively trivial, some not. For example, a less important manifestation of my resistance to change might be found in how I choose to negotiate my 25-mile commute to work. I take the same path every day, avoiding the interstate and its high-speed intensities and instead opting for the relatively tranquil state roads where I tool along at 45 per. After several years of construction, a new loop was added to the interstate several months ago that I have heard would cut a few minutes off of my commute, should I take it. But I haven’t even tried it. I’m just not interested.

A more meaningful example of my resistance to change would be that other path -- the career one -- that I chose a long time ago and have similarly stuck to for a good while now.

The poker writing has now become a not insignificant detour from that one for me, taking me to Las Vegas last summer to cover the WSOP, and allowing me to leave that same old, tedious main road for longer and longer stretches. I may well be going back to the WSOP this summer, and am starting to think more and more about whether or not I even want to return to the main road. Not quite ready to make that decision, but Vera and I have been talking more and more about the possibility of my doing so.

My resistance to change manifests itself in my poker playing, too -- to my detriment, I’m afraid. For one, I tend to pick one game and stick to it in an almost obsessive (or superstitious) way, even though I know switching up would likely keep my poker instincts sharper in all games. I also tend to have a hard time moving around stakes-wise, especially if I’m extracting a modest win rate wherever I happen to be. Kind of limits my ever seeing what exactly I’m capable of doing, poker-wise.

The most harmful effect of resisting change at the poker table, though, is that others can “see” you much more quickly and clearly than they can otherwise. And, making matters worse, you tend not to pay attention to yourself, either. It’s easy in any game to turn predictable and make your patterns of raises, continuation bets, checks, and folds become blatantly apparent to others. Gotta be ready and willing to change it up, and often, since doing so increases your own understanding of yourself, and tends to decrease others’ understanding. And when that happens, you win. Usually.

Anyhow, one thing ain’t gonna change, and that is I’ll keep you updated here on all of the changes.

Follow You, Follow Me

Mentioned a couple of weeks ago how that Twitter thing had stealthily crept onto my radar. Was sitting there in the back of my mind last night as I read Otis opining about it. Otis is smart.

Then I decided, sure, why not. So I got me an account: @hardboiledpoker. “Shamus” was taken, and “Short-Stacked Shamus” too many characters, apparently.

I’m starting to think I myself am too many characters.

Has been an especially busy time over the last few weeks balancing the pokery stuff -- a little bit of playing, a lot of writing, and a lot more writing -- with everything else. By which I mean the “real” life which continues apace, that non-pokery stuff which includes a full-time job. The noggin’ is getting crowded.

One other thing squeezing its way into my ever-addled cranium is the fact that Vera Valmore and I will be making a quick trip to Vegas next week, during which time I’m hoping to connect with a number of folks. The World Poker Tour Championship -- the Five Star World Poker Classic -- is cranking up at the end of next week at the Bellagio, too, and so I imagine I’ll probably head over there some to see what I can see.

While there I am hoping to attend a meeting of one of those Wednesday Poker Discussion Groups over at Binion’s Horseshoe and Casino next week. If you’ve read any of Dr. Al Schoonmaker’s books (or listened to his old podcast), you remember he talks about the WPDG from time to time. I think it would be neat to sit in on one of the meetings and see what folks are discussing.

This Vegas trip, which will only last for a few days, of course brings to mind the last one, which lasted a couple of months. Still unsure about whether or not I’ll be back out in Vegas this summer to cover the WSOP, although it could happen. Everyone is still in the planning stages as far as media goes, I think, and so there are a lot of people who still don’t know for sure what exactly they’ll be doing come the end of May.

I’ve written before here about how positive the experience was for me last summer helping cover the WSOP for PokerNews. During those last days in mid-July, my sense was it was definitely something I could stand to do again. So we’ll see. I’ll definitely let you know here what I end up doing. Heck, I might even send out a tweet about it.

Between now and then are more SCOOP recaps for the PokerStars blog. That continues through next Monday (April 13), when we’ll be live blogging Day 2 of the big no-limit hold’em Main Event. I’ll be helping with the “high” stakes version of that one, the $10,000+$300 event.

Wonder how many will come out for that, actually. The WCOOP Main Event last September was a $5,000+$200 buy-in, and attracted 2,185 entrants. So perhaps 1,200 for this one? Maybe a few more?

Some of these SCOOP recaps have meant late nights for yr humble gumshoe, although I think overall I’ve gotten a lucky draw compared to some of my colleagues. Haven’t had to stay up past 2 or 3 a.m., which has been good considering I generally have to get up early.

Am also hoping to post another episode of the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show very soon, perhaps this weekend. I think I might should just call it a monthly show so as not to tease folks into thinking I can manage it more frequently. April 1 was actually the one-year anniversary of the show, during which time 14 episodes were produced. So, yeah, it’s a monthly.

Okay, am ready to post. Do I send a “tweet” saying I have posted something? Do people do that? I think I won’t. If you wanna read, you’ll read. (And as always, thanks for doing so!)

Many months ago, Michele Lewis had invited me to follow her on Twitter, but since I didn’t have an account I didn’t. I added her soon after creating my account. And yes, today’s post title was written with Michele in mind. (Explanation here.)

Have a good weekend, all.

Bonomo Ban No Mo’

Last summer I had the chance to help cover the World Series of Poker for PokerNews, and the first final table I live blogged was a good one -- Event No. 4, the $5,000 Mixed No-Limit/Limit Hold’em event won by Erick Lindgren. The table went nearly 200 hands, the last 40 or so were heads up between Lindgren and Justin “ZeeJustin” Bonomo.

Was looking back at the blog, where Tropical Steve and I alternated reporting hands. Bonomo had the chip lead once it got to heads up (about 3-to-2), and at the time it looked a lot like he would probably take it down. Really, for most of the night it seemed as though Bonomo was the one in charge. Which was saying something, given who else was at that final table: David Williams, Howard Lederer, Isaac Haxton, Roland de Wolfe, David Rheem, Andrew Robl, and Pat Pezzin.

This was a televised FT, and when it was all over Lindgren was interviewed by Norman Chad. Those interviews generally end up going on for six or eight questions or so, from which ESPN chops out the little ten-second clip that gets tacked on to the end of the broadcast. In the blog I reported some from that interview, including relating how Lindgren noted that once he’d gotten the lead on Bonomo he remained worried his opponent might still come back on him, right up until the last river card was dealt.

I remember Lindgren also in there somewhere saying some nice things about his opponent, and stating very confidently that Bonomo was going to be winning multiple bracelets himself in the future. I think everyone there watching that final table was thoroughly convinced -- if they weren’t already -- that Bonomo was indeed a hell of a player.

Amid the buzz this week is the fact that Bonomo has been allowed back on PokerStars after being banned from the site for over three years (since February 2006) for having been caught entering tournaments multiple times with different accounts. This was shortly after Bonomo had been caught doing something similar over on PartyPoker, from which site he was banned as well.

Bonomo turned 21 later that year, and soon began tearing up the live tourney poker scene. He barely missed a WPT final table that December, finishing seventh at the Five Diamond World Poker Classic (the one Joe Hachem won). He made a final table at the 2007 WSOP in a NLHE event, where he also made a deep run in the $50K H.O.R.S.E. event, finishing 18th, just a couple of spots away from the money. He has already tripped up to over $1.5 million in tourney winnings. All of which further establishes Bonomo’s poker prowess.

If you’ve heard Bonomo interviewed on any of the podcasts or on his own show, All Strategy (which now may well be on a permanent hiatus), you know he’s articulate, too, and has a gift (I think) for communicating poker-related concepts. And he’s also obviously remorseful for what he did, never shying from questions about the cheating and accepting full responsibility (unlike some others have done). At least that has been the case every time I’ve heard him talk about the issue.

That being said, I guess I’m still scratching my head as to why PokerStars would make this decision to allow “ZeeJustin” back on the site. I’m not saying I don’t think Bonomo understands the gravity of his transgressions, and in fact I do believe that besides being a great player, he has a lot to contribute to the poker community as well. In fact, my wondering has nothing much to do with Bonomo at all -- I agree with the notion that his is something of a special case and therefore probably deserves to be considered differently than others.

I guess I just don’t quite see what exactly PokerStars has to gain here.

One PokerStars customer wrote the site to complain about the unbanning of Bonomo, and received a reply that pointed out how Bonomo had “accepted the consequences of his actions” and as far as PokerStars knew never “tried to circumvent his suspension.” The support person additionally notes how Bonomo has not only “expressed regret for his actions” but “has even become a crusader for fair play” since his banning.

A poll over on PocketFives currently has about 64% of respondents saying they agree with the decision to let Bonomo back on the site, with 36% saying it was not a “good move” by Stars to do so. On the TwoPlusTwo PokerCast this week, the hosts mentioned the thread on that forum discussing the matter, and estimated there, too, the split was about 60-40 in favor of the decision.

I suppose my instinctive response is negative, as I don’t like the idea of letting others believe there exists a (legit) avenue back onto an online site after one has been caught cheating in such a flagrant manner. (That’s ignoring the particulars of Bonomo’s case, I know.) I suppose it would be helpful if somehow Stars additionally provided a way for Bonomo to continue being “a crusader for fair play,” although I’m not sure exactly how that sort of “community service” could be done.

Thinking back to the respect Lindgren expressed for Bonomo after that WSOP final table, I think it’s pretty clear E-dog wouldn’t have been so generous about his opponent if Bonomo had been previously caught cheating in a live setting.

But he wasn’t. More evidence in support of the thesis that everything is different online.

Poker Book Review: Tri Nguyen's The Pot Limit Omaha Book: Transitioning from NLHE to PLO

Some of you may recall a post I wrote back in December titled “This Book Might Be Out of Your Range.” In that one I passed along some news regarding a new eBook on no-limit hold’em strategy authored by Cole “CTS” South and Tri “SlowHabit” Nguyen titled Let There Be Range.

I’d heard about it on a podcast, then looked into it a little further, mainly intrigued by the book’s prodigious price tag -- $1,850. I had a little bit of fun in that post regarding the book’s cost, and I concluded with a jokey comment about how the authors could send me a review copy.

I ended up getting a bit of feedback on that one, including eventually hearing from Tri Nguyen who sent me a nice note saying he liked the post. A couple of weeks ago Nguyen got back in touch to let me know he had a new book coming out on pot-limit Omaha, and in fact wanted to know if I’d be interested in reading it and perhaps writing a little something about it. I told him I suspected I might not be squarely within his target audience, but I’d be glad to do so.

If you don’t know Tri Nguyen, he’s been a highly accomplished online player for some time now. He also made a fairly deep run in last summer’s WSOP Main Event (finishing 103rd). There’s a short interview with Nguyen in the latest Card Player magazine (Vol. 22, No. 7 -- the one with Huck Seed on the cover) where one can learn a little bit more about his background going to Berkeley and earning a degree in computer science, then his getting into poker and rapidly moving up stakes.

Nguyen tells me the new book targets PLO50 to PLO600 players, primarily short-handed, with a special focus on trying to help the no-limit hold’em player looking to move over to PLO. The title is The Pot Limit Omaha Book: Transitioning from NLH to PLO, and it is due to be released on April 30th. The price tag on this one is going to be $375, with the preorder price being $275. One can find out more about the book and ordering info over at the Daily Variance website.

On the one hand, I’m not that well-suited to review the book, given that I don’t exactly resemble the player profile of the reader Nguyen has in mind for it. I have played quite a bit of PLO50, but am hardly part of the crowd Nguyen is really addressing, both because of the size of my bankroll and because I’m not really one of those NLHE players looking to make a transition to PLO. On the other hand, I have read quite a few pot-limit Omaha books and have written my share of book reviews, and so can probably say at least a little something worthwhile about Nguyen’s book.

The book is relatively short, but packs a good amount of material in its pages, avoiding the usual filler one often finds in longer poker strategy texts. I’ll be honest -- I wasn’t too crazy about reading it on the computer screen, as I’m one of those who likes to mark up books as I read, especially if I’m going to be reviewing them. (The security software attached to the book prevents printing.) But it wasn’t too arduous to get through that way.

After an introductory section, the book starts with a chapter covering preflop play that discusses starting hands and the games people play before the flop with regard to raising, 3- and 4-betting, and so forth. There’s some good advice here about the assumptions many players have about the significance of preflop raising, as well as a couple of points about the equity of certain starting hand matchups I hadn’t necessarily realized before. There are also some graphs illustrating certain observations that I’ll admit to having passed over since such things tend to hurt my brain.

The next three chapters cover various concepts and common situations one encounters in PLO. While some of what’s covered here I’ve seen discussed elsewhere, there are some ideas and explanations that were new to me. A theme that emerges here is the difference between NLHE and PLO, and one of the things I liked most about the book was the way Nguyen frequently uses analogies from NLHE to explain what’s going on in a given PLO situation. For instance, when explaining the ways a starting hand like Q-T-4-5 can get one into trouble in PLO, Nguyen refers to how A-9-offsuit plays in NLHE to make the point clearer. This frequently employed strategy is handy, I think, and is something that might distinguish his book a bit from other PLO texts.

Subsequent chapters cover flop, turn, and river play, and are filled with a large number of sample hands that apply some of those concepts discussed earlier while introducing new ideas, too. It was during this part of the book that I most consciously felt that I might not be part of the target audience. It’s hard to explain, exactly, but has to do mainly with the way Nguyen talks about hands, which I know would make perfect sense to a certain group of NLHE players but was different from the way I would think and talk about hands. (Am I making sense?)

The overall organization of the book could be better, I think, but in the end one comes away with a fairly coherent approach to PLO that I do think will prove useful to Nguyen’s target audience. Is it worth $375? Hey, my name is “Short-Stacked.” How can I respond to that? I’ll just answer that question as any existentialist would and say it’s up to you.

On a personal note, Nguyen and I ended up exchanging a few emails regarding the book and he struck me as a very friendly, smart dude who genuinely has something to contribute to our pokery knowledge. And I much appreciate his good humor regarding my earlier post, as well as his invitation for me to read the new book.

As I say, if you are interested, check out Nguyen’s site, Daily Variance, for more on the book.

(EDIT [added 5/26/09]: If you are interested in reading more about the book, check out this review from a reader better-equipped than I to judge the book, Foucault.)