Nixon Was a Five-Card Man

My “Poker in American Film and Culture” course includes a couple of readings I’ve written about here on Hard-Boiled Poker before -- a 1932 short story by the humorist James Thurber called “Everything Is Wild” and a 1963 essay by the historian John Lukacs titled “Poker and American Character.”

The Thurber story I discussed once in a post titled “Hold’em’s History Makes a Good Mystery.” The story involves a “dealer’s choice” game in which a few different variants are called -- including some made-up ones -- and one of them suggests elements of hold’em which led me to share that as an early, not necessarily reliable bit of evidence regarding hold’em’s origins.

I also many years ago included “Everything Is Wild” in Episode 13 of the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show, if you fancy hearing a reading of the very funny story.

Meanwhile the Lukacs essay received lengthy treatment in a couple of different posts, which if you go read them kind of add up to my lecture about the article. Here’s Part 1 of that discussion, and here’s Part 2.

All I want to say about the readings today is to point out a parallel between the main character in Thurber’s story, Mr. Brush, and Lukacs, both of whom express distaste with any variant of poker that diverges from what Lukacs calls “classic” poker.

In the story, Brush gets stuck playing a game in which others all want to play variants involving wild cards, and he “hated any silly variation of the fine old game of poker.” In the essay Lukacs also complains about poker being corrupted (in a sense) by the introduction of wild-card games, in which (he says) “the human factor is weakened and the factor of chance is correspondingly increased.”

Both Brush and Lukacs see wild-card games as indicative of bigger problems with society, in fact, with the way they tend to favor luck over skill suggesting a kind of immaturity among the thrill-seekers who favor them. Lukacs explicitly links wild-card games with a more general “erosion of the American national character,” something you can read more about, if you like, by following those links above.

Richard Nixon was another one who favored “straight” or “classic” poker over any variants including wild cards or anything diverging from traditional games. Five-card stud was his favorite game, and the one he played the most while taking thousands off fellow soldiers in the Pacific during WWII -- money he in fact would use to help fund his first Congressional campaign in 1946.

Many years later on September 7, 1972, then President Nixon had some visitors stop by the Oval Office just before noon -- the former governor of Texas John Connally (at the time heading up the “Democrats for Nixon”) and John and James Roosevelt, sons of FDR. The meeting was recorded, and while the audio is choppy and at times indistinct, Nixon’s disdain for wild-card games is nonetheless clear.

Nixon tells the Roosevelt sons about the home he owns in San Clemente, the famous “La Casa Pacifica” he bought from the widow of financier Henry Hamilton Cotton in 1969. Speaking of FDR, Nixon notes how “Cotton was a great supporter of his, of course” and how FDR even stayed there one night, something the sons sounds as though they might not have known.

“There was a rumor they were all supposed to play cards or something one night... poker, probably” Nixon continues animatedly, well knowing that FDR was a card player just like himself. “What did he play?” he asks John and James of their father. “Did he play five-card or did he like wild cards?” Before they can answer, Nixon declares his position on the issue: “I’m a five-card man, I like it.”

One of the sons -- it’s hard to tell which -- says something about how “once in a while one or two of the others would want to go play a wild game.” People are talking over one another, with other ambient noise making it hard to distinguish every word being spoken. But you can hear Nixon’s response pretty well:

“Wild cards is not poker,” Nixon says. “When you’ve got five cards, you know just what the odds are.”

It isn’t surprising to hear Nixon -- like Mr. Brush and Lukacs -- voicing a negative opinion regarding wild-card games. It also isn’t hard to think of Nixon when Brush spitefully invents his own wild-card games in Thurber’s story (e.g., “Soap-in-Your-Eye”) -- games for which he is making up the rules as they go and thus his opponents cannot possibly win.

Makes me think of the old sketch from the National Lampoon Radio Hour in which Nixon plays Monopoly (the 1/26/74 episode):

RMN: “All right, Bebe. You get Baltic Avenue. Now I’m the banker so give me $500 for the deed.”
Bebe: “But Mr. President, Baltic doesn’t cost $500. It’s only $60.”
RMN: “Ha.. well, Bebe, let’s just ask Chuck and Fred Buzhardt here. Fellas, what do you say? You’re my advisors...?”
Chuck & Fred (in unison): “The President’s right, Bebe. Give him $500 for Baltic.”
RMN: “Now... my turn...”

Forward-Looking With Amaya

I took close to an hour out of the day today to listen to that Amaya conference call in which the new owners of PokerStars and Full Tilt (since August of last year) discussed earnings from last year’s fourth quarter. Or rather I should say I listened to the sucker while performing various farm chores, as an .mp3 of the call has been uploaded here.

Chris Grove of Online Poker Report has also spent some time listening to the call, and in fact has transcribed the whole thing here, if you’re curious.

Among the headlines coming out of the call were CEO David Baazov’s statements -- “forward-looking” and thus subject to the usual disclaimers about such, natch -- regarding the future growth of poker (“we are still a poker-first business” he reiterates), as well as about other areas of interest for Amaya in the coming months and years.

“Our goal is to double the poker sector in the next five years,” stated Baazov, adding that the “three primary ways” Amaya aims to achieve that goal will be “entering new markets where we currently have little or no penetration in real-money poker,” “creating consumer demand and excitement through innovative marketing and promotions,” and “continuing to innovate the product to attract more players and reactivate lapsed players.”

Immediate response to the idea of doubling the poker sector within five years varied from expressions of doubt to outright cynicism, although if you think about it in the context of online poker five years is a lifetime.

Baazov spoke further of particular areas of the world Amaya desires entering, including those states in the U.S. with current online gaming legislation and those considering it (in which Amaya is actively lobbying). He talked as well about the other “verticals” including casino games and sports betting, the latter having only modestly launched in a beta version this week.

The other big headline coming out of his comments had to do with the declaration of an intention to enter daily fantasy sports, an area currently dominated by FanDuel and DraftKings. That latter intention obviously raises eyebrows here in the U.S. where the majority of us aren’t currently included in discussions of online poker or online casino games (and likely won’t be for some time).

CFO Daniel Sebag came on after that to talk specifics regarding the 4Q bottom line and what’s anticipated going forward, then Baazov hopped back on to talk briefly about the current investigation by the Autorité des Marchés financiers (AMF) regarding some trading occurring around the time Amaya acquired the Rational Group as well as the company’s application to be listed on NASDAQ Global Select Market. He also alluded to Amaya’s sale of the gaming machine supplier Cadillac Jack, announced earlier in the week.

The Q&A that followed touched on further specifics, mostly reiterating points made during the statements. There elaboration was made regarding Amaya and daily fantasy sports, with Baazov responding to a question by saying “the goal is to be up before the NFL season starts.” He also mentioned specifically the U.S. folks who were “formerly PokerStars players” and how Amaya is banking on “a clear, strong crossover with poker.”

It is always curious to eavesdrop on these sorts of discussions. And to look back on them at some future date as indicators of what a company was thinking at a current moment in time. You know, when backward-looking rather than forward-looking.

Players Sponsoring Themselves on Twitch

Was reading about Twitch this week. Hadn’t realized it had begun as a spinoff from the old Justin.tv, which I recall having tuned into occasionally in the past, including during those early marathon-streaming days of the old Quadjacks who I believe moved there at some point not long after Black Friday.

Justin.tv began back in 2007, then in 2011 created Twitch as a kind of separate network just for video gaming and “e-sports” competitions. The latter grew in popularity, then last summer Justin.tv was shut down so the parent company (Twitch Interactive) could focus just on Twitch.

Back in February PokerNews did an article suggesting 10 poker-related Twitch accounts to follow. Last month Eric Raskin wrote an interesting piece for All In looking at Twitch from a more theoretical point of view and relating it to other forms of “life streaming” whereby people turn their lives into shows for others to watch. (Twitter functions like that for some, I think, as I was writing about yesterday.)

BLUFF just ran a long profile of Scott Ball, a.k.a. “The Man Behind Twitch’s Poker Explosion,” which includes an overview of the site’s brief history and increasing involvement with poker.

Even The Wall Street Journal has written about Twitch becoming a destination for online poker players and those who enjoy watching others play (and/or learning about poker, too). The WSJ article cited a statistic that “In January, Twitch streamed 56 million minutes of poker, less than 1% of the total 16 billion minutes of streamed video on the site.” There were only 44,640 minutes in January, so I suppose that means an average of about 1,250 poker-related streams were live every minute of every day that month -- more than I’d have guessed.

Those who are able to get 500 or more viewers to watch their streams consistently are eligible to have a subscriber button put on their channels, which in turn becomes a way for viewers to subscribe for $4.99 a month (half of which goes to Twitch). Subscribers can then be offered extras such as special programming, access to archives, and so on.

Those who have Twitch channels can also derive income by selling advertising (with the revenue also shared 50/50 with Twitch). Twitchers can additionally get sponsorships or collect donations as a way to “monetize” what they’re doing, and in the case of poker players who are also coaches, they can use their Twitch channels to direct folks to purchase other content, hire them as coaches, and so on.

It struck me that with the paucity of online poker sponsorships post-Black Friday, Twitch has become a form of “self-sponsorship” for a not insignificant number of players, kind of analogous to self-publishing or other kinds of independently-produced content (e.g., music, video/film).

For me it remains a kind of idle, only occasionally-sought-after entertainment, although I continue to be impressed with how some -- with Jason Somerville the pioneer and current Twitch “chip leader” (by far) -- have found ways to make it work both for them and their viewers/followers/subscribers. And I continue to be curious about what will come of it, too.

Time for a Twitter Break?

Like many people -- especially those who have jobs that require them to be online most of the time -- I’ve gotten into the habit of checking Twitter frequently throughout the day to see what messages those I follow are sending out.

Maybe you do this, too, clicking on TweetDeck (or whatever program) you use many times an hour, such as when a web page doesn’t load instantly or in between (and during) practically every other task you are performing throughout the day. Twitter becomes kind of a constant hum that plays behind everything you do, sometimes getting very noisy and disruptive while other times just providing a kind of mental ambience that may or may not be constructive for you as you try to get other things done.

Something today made me think about different Twitter “styles” and how they resemble the different styles of poker playing. I think such thoughts might have been inspired by the fact that folks seemed especially argumentative on my timeline today (for whatever reason).

Some are obviously “loose” with their tweets, like a player who plays more hands than most, while others are “tight” and only get involved occasionally. And of course, some are “aggressive” in the way they engage others on there while many are “passive” with their comments.

The analogy can be pursued much further, if one wants. Some are clearly there just to have fun, while others perhaps view Twitter more like a job or business -- either literally (e.g., those who are tweeting with the explicit purpose to “monetize”) or in a figurative way (e.g., those who are genuinely trying to “profit” in some way from their interactions over Twitter). In other words, some “play” at Twitter while others “work” at it (or appear to, anyway).

Twitter is also like a poker game insofar as those who “take a seat” do so voluntarily, and in fact could be said (in a way) to have consciously selected the “game” or at least to have chosen the other players by following them. That said, people can retweet others and can introduce lots of other content into your timeline that you haven’t necessarily “chosen” to read or see. But for the most part we are mostly able to manage the “game” somewhat, not having to “play” with those we don’t wish to.

This latter aspect of Twitter makes me reluctant to complain about it -- that is to say, if I find the chatter tedious or wearying or in any way unpleasant, I’ve really only myself to blame as no one forced me to log on to read (or “sit down” and “play”). And besides, the people whose tweets I’m reading I’ve willingly chosen to follow, anyway.

My own Twitter game has become increasingly “tight-passive” over the last year or two, I think. I only occasionally tweet -- I probably average one or two a day -- and usually only to crack jokes, link to new blog posts, or share funny photos from the farm. Perhaps because I became an adult well before social media or even the internet turned into such a big part of our lives, I am mostly hesitant to share much in the way of personal details over Twitter, nor am I that encouraged to engage in even benign conversations about much of anything.

It still seems odd to me to have a “conversation” with someone with a big crowd “watching” -- a lot more odd than playing a hand of poker in front of a table full of others who aren’t in the hand.

In other words, I’m content mostly to fold, only playing once in a while in a very low-risk way. Meanwhile I watch others battle over pots, although lately I’ve started to realize I’m not always enjoying that, either.

I’ve written here before about how I have mostly avoided Facebook entirely, only having had an account over there early on for a short while before deleting it. I’m thinking I might start “sitting out” of Twitter, too, if only just to take a break and see how I like not always having the “game” going.

Taking breaks from poker is often helpful to stay refreshed and keep one’s level of interest and engagement up. Maybe it’s time to do something similar with Twitter. (And no, this ain’t an April Fool’s gag.)

Playing By the Book, Playing By Feel

Almost exactly two years ago I wrote a post here about the 27-game winning streak of the Miami Heat which had just been snapped, in particular focusing on Shane Battier’s level-headed comments afterwards which evoked the idea of an intelligent poker player recognizing he’d been on the good side of variance for longer than should be expected.

“What’s amazing is that we’ve avoided that for so long,” said Battier, referring to the “garden-variety road loss” to the Chicago Bulls they had just suffered. “That was my first thought after the game,” he said, that the Heat had “avoided a loss like this for a long time.”

This afternoon I dialed up Dan Le Batard’s show on ESPN on which Battier was a guest host, and I found him thoroughly entertaining with his commentary and various anecdotes. When talking about his playing days (he retired last year), he once again evoked that same balanced, even intellectual approach to the game.

Early during the first hour, Battier referred to his lengthy NBA career and how even though he was a gifted player he wasn’t necessarily the most skilled or physically imposing. “You don’t play 13 years in the NBA at 215 lbs. as a power forward without having a few tricks in your bag,” he said.

Among those tricks was to study his opponents, in particular the players he’d be matched up against, and even crunch numbers in order to determine the best percentage plays over the long term. “I play basketball like blackjack,” he said at one point, using an analogy to explain his approach. “There’s a ‘house’ way to play it, and a ‘feel’ way to play it. I tried to play basketball like a game of blackjack -- by what the book says.”

Battier elaborated on that idea again during the second hour as they brought up a statistic regarding Kobe Bryant who in “iso situations” (one-on-one) versus Battier shot only 34% during his career, his lowest versus any defender who had played at least 350 minutes against him.

“That makes me blush,” said Battier, earning a round of laughter from the others as he joked about having a plaque made to commemorate the accomplishment. Then he offered to explain how exactly he had managed to be such a strong defender against one of the game’s best offensive players ever.

“Most of that probably happened during the first half of my career when I didn’t know what the heck I was doing,” he begins, sounding a little like a lot of professional poker players who started out their careers running especially well, thereby enabling them to stay in the game longer than they might have otherwise. And, importantly, to gain some experience to help them learn the game better, thereby helping them later in their careers.

“It wasn’t until the later half of my career when I was introduced to basketball analytics [that] I understood what was a good shot, what was a bad shot, what was inefficient... what a player’s weakness actually was,” Battier continued. “I didn’t know for the first six years. The first six years defense was all about heart and toughness and grit.”

I add the italics in the last sentence to indicate how Battier pronounced those words through clenched teeth, kind of exaggerating their importance. It was after those first six years he was traded to the Houston Rockets, got introduced to a couple of people in their organization with knowledge of advanced stats (including Daryl Morey, the team’s GM who is well known for such knowledge), and from that point forward used that information to help himself perform at a level that might well have been above what he would have otherwise.

Interesting to hear Battier talk about basketball in this way, and again to evoke ideas that so closely mirror how we hear poker players -- good ones, especially -- talk about like variance, understanding probabilities (versus playing by “feel”), assessing opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, and so on.

Good stuff. And -- again, I shake my head -- coming from a Dookie! (I evoke my own irrationality in the face of such a logical thinker.)

Here is a short video of Battier discussing the same subject (and from which the image above comes), titled “How Analytics Made Me a Better Basketball Player.”

Regional Finals, Final Tables, and the Coming Final Four

Not unexpectedly, both my Heels and my NCAA bracket crumbled, and now I semi-dread the inevitable happening a week from today, namely a Kentucky-Duke final. (Others feel similarly?) Some exciting games, though, particularly in the regional finals.

Meanwhile I watched some poker on the computer this weekend, too. On Saturday I frequently dipped in and out of the EPT Live stream of the final table over at EPT Malta, including some of the seven-hour long heads-up battle between the two Frenchmen, Valentin Messina and Jean Montury that Montury ultimately won.

They ended up playing 148 hands total against one another, with the lead swinging back and forth in what turned out to be a hard-fought duel. What stood out the most, however, was the emotion Messina showed during his all-ins in the latter stages (such as pictured above in a screenshot from the stream).

Was hard not to be affected just a little watching him, something mentioned both in the commentary and in the PokerStars blog recap of the final table. The latter includes a nice picture of Montury consoling Messina after the final hand, as well as a good description of the scene by Howard Swains -- check it out.

Then on Sunday I followed a random tweet alerting me to the fact that Barry Greenstein had found his way over onto Twitch, and once on his channel I discovered him playing what turned out to be the priciest play money tournament ever on PokerStars, a 1 billion-play chip tournament that attracted 31 players.

Interestingly, Greenstein’s fellow Team PokerStars Pro Chris Moneymaker also took part, and the two of them ended up making it all of the way to heads-up against one another. Decidedly less emotion was on display for that heads-up match, although it was clear both were battling just as earnestly until Greenstein ultimately emerged the victor, winning 13.95 billion play-chip first prize while Moneymaker picked up 9.3 billion.

Obviously the kitty there was not as significant as what Montury and Messina were playing for (Montury won €687,400 while Messina took away €615,000 following a heads-up deal). Even so, from the rail both were interesting finishes to follow. And I guess the parallels help point up how poker can be meaningful at a wide variety of stakes, high to low.

I guess in both cases I wasn’t necessarily rooting for either player to win, but rather just to see a well-competed contest, which turned out to be so in both cases. Meanwhile we’ll see if that NCAA tournament comes down to the predictable heads-up next Monday, too, where (if does turn out to be the Wildcats and Blue Devils) I guess I’ll also lack any specific rooting interest.

Go Michigan State! Go Wisconsin!

Four for Urbanovich

Have mentioned here before how once a week I compile a report on the latest Global Poker Index rankings -- both overall and Player of the Year -- for PokerNews.

Since the overall rankings reflects results going back as much as two years, there usually isn’t too much dramatic movement at the top. A player winning a tournament earns a decent number of points and can move up even hundreds of spots down below, but among the top 10, anyway, the players are pretty dug in. Indeed, this week the top 10 players are the same as from a week ago, with Ole Schemion in the top spot for a 14th straight week.

Meanwhile the POY race is a bit more volatile, especially as we’re still early in the year and players are just starting to gather points. Those doing well at the first big festivals of 2015 -- the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, EPT Deauville and EPT Malta, the WPT stops and WSOP-C stops, and others -- are the ones populating that list right now.

Thus it wasn’t too much of a surprise this week to be reporting a new POY leader, Poland’s Dzmitry Urbanovich, although it was notable to see he’d jumped all the way from No. 17 to No. 1 this week. And that he’d leapfrogged way ahead of the chase pack, suddenly turning up with a little over 2,380 points, more than 600 ahead of nearest challenger Joe Kuether.

Knew Urbanovich had been winning side events in Malta, and at the time of that report and the latest rankings he’d in fact won three different ones.

The €25,500 High Roller had gotten some news earlier in the week, with Urbanovich topping a tough field of 68 entries to win a €572,300 first prize. A few days later he bested a 156-entry field in the €1,100 NLHE Turbo to win another trophy and €35,200. Then the day after that he won a third event, the €5,200 NLHE Turbo that drew 55 entries to claim a €110,000 first prize.

At the time Urbanovich had additionally cashed in two other events -- final tabling both including finishing runner-up in a stud event. Then today came the news that he’d won a fourth side event in Malta, the €220 Crazy Pineapple Turbo tournament that drew a field of 56 to earn Urbanovich a modest €3,260 first prize.

Even with the small fields in a couple of the events, winning four tournaments in a single series is remarkable. Indeed, Chris Hall reports it represents a record for the EPT.

Some feat, and again suggests something about how winning begets winning in poker.

Heart vs. Head: Top Seeds Collide

Gearing up to watch some more basketball this evening, further energized to do so because (1) my UNC Tar Heels are still in action, playing a Sweet Sixteen game tonight against the West region’s top seed, Wisconsin, and (2) I’m still alive (I think) to cash in the tourney pool.

Of course, if I’m going to be at all realistic regarding both of those points, I’d have to admit that the prospects for Carolina aren’t so sanguine (they are six-point dogs) and my prospects for getting into the money in the pool aren’t so bright, either. That’s because I have Dook losing this weekend, undefeated Kentucky getting knocked out in the semis, and Arizona winning the sucker.

That is to say, I have a chance not unlike the player with nothing but an inside straight draw with one card to come can still win versus an opponent’s two pair.

If I could redo my bracket I would have Kentucky beating Dook in the finals. They are the two strongest-seeming teams right now (by a lot), and in truth if I hadn’t been more governed by my heart than my head when filling it out originally, I’d have done it that way in the first place.

But I don’t want to see Kentucky run the table. And it goes without saying what my feelings are about the Blue Devils.

I used to enter a pool each year with a lot of fellow UNC grads, most of whom every single year would pick UNC to win it all and Dook to lose in the first round. It was a fun pool to play because of the huge edge many who played automatically gave the rest by picking according to what they wanted to see happen as opposed to what they thought might actually play out.

If you think about it, though, all NCAA pools are probably affected similarly -- if not so severely -- by participants’ being overly influenced when picking games by their desire to see a certain outcome in the actual tournament than by the desire to win the pool.

Incidentally, I picked the Heels to lose last round, but since I have Wisconsin winning tonight, it’ll be a win-win!

Says my heart, anyway. My head insists it’s a lose-lose.

Will Someone Please Give Me Back My Freedom Not to Gamble!

Like some who read this blog, I dialed into that House hearing that took place during the late afternoon and early evening today, the one held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations to discuss that proposed Restoration of America’s Wire Act.

The hearing had been scheduled earlier in the month then delayed. I wrote something here at the time about it, in particular regarding the rumored list of witnesses almost all of whom were virulently anti-gambling in pretty much all forms, with the online version considered especially grievous. (Also wrote about RAWA during last December’s lame duck session when its proponents were hoping it might sneak through.)

Had the sucker on while working in the kitchen preparing dinner, an Irish pot pie with lentils, carrots, and turnips that turned out nicely. Thankfully the hearing ended before we sat down to eat, as much of the testimony and answers from the witnesses was sadly stomach-turning.

The hearing -- like most on the Hill -- was obviously primarily a bit of theater that allowed most involved to pretend to engage in a “dialogue” about the idea represented by RAWA, namely, to prohibit all forms of online gambling in the United States. It’s a truly radical idea, the consequences of which would not be insignificant should the bill become law. And so John Kindt (a business prof. with a long history of raving testimony comparing gambling to drugs), Les Bernal (director of the Stop Predatory Gambling Foundation), and Michael Fagan (not the guy who broke into Buckingham Palace back in the 1980s, but an adjunct law prof. with experience prosecuting money-launderers and racketeers) were there voicing fairly radical views about the widespread harms of gambling and the need for government to protect us from ourselves.

The testimony of these three was often so out-to-lunch it was hard not to crack wise in response. Bernal in particular went on a rant about “government-sponsored internet gambling” (even pounding the desk and repeating phrases as he did) that seemed to want to suggest that by not prohibiting gambling, governments were somehow requiring people to gamble.

For example, Bernal characterizes those who argue in favor of “states rights” on the issue of online gambling as adopting a position that “state governments should be allowed to force casino gambling and lottery games into every bedroom, dorm room and smart phone in their communities, even though a strong majority of individuals in states don’t want it.” Such is part of his larger characterization of a “predatory” government looking for ways to exploit its citizens.

Of course, what Bernal is saying is patently absurd. States that have passed laws allowing their citizens to gamble online in a regulated environment (as in a licensed casino) are obviously not “forcing” these games into citizens’ lives.

At one point Bernal tossed out a statistic that 5% of the population has had their lives “turned upside down by gambling,” a stat gleaned, incidentally, from an NIH study speculating (without supporting data) that both “pathological and problem gambling may affect up to 5% of Americans” (italics added). But of course he turns the idea of prohibition upside down when he weirdly suggests that government should enact a law to take away a freedom in order to give citizens the freedom not to do something.

Kindt meanwhile maintained regulation to be simply an entirely impossible goal, utterly ignoring the evidence of states having successfully managed to do just that and instead citing sources dating back to the 1990s as support. Fagan likewise looked not at regulated online gambling but unregulated examples as providing evidence of online gambling having financed terrorism.

Not everyone testifying was as crazed-sounding or illogical as these three often were. Parry Aftab of Wired Safety was again a balanced witness who suggested regulation a much preferable alternative to prohibition, while the R Street Institute’s Andrew Moylan pointed out how federal bill like RAWA would wrongly usurp states’ rights.

Most distasteful was the bill’s sponsor, Jason Chaffetz (pictured above), appearing to ignore what everyone was saying while maintaining it to be a “fiction for anyone to believe” states can in fact keep citizens from gambling online on sites maintained outside the state’s borders. Chaffetz delivered that point hastily, then left the hearing before it was over. Didn’t see him drop a mic before leaving, although it felt like he should have.

I trust some members of the subcommittee did learn something yesterday, although like I say, the hearing itself often seemed more about deception than instruction. If you’re curious, check out others’ more detailed rundowns of the hearing, among them Matthew Kredell’s for PokerNews and Steve Ruddock’s for BLUFF. If you can stomach them, that is.

Joining Team Moneymaker

Had great fun last night playing a poker tournament. Feel like I haven’t been able to say that much lately.

If you happen to follow Chris Moneymaker on Twitter, you might have seen him yesterday inviting people to join his new PokerStars Home Game. He has a new website -- Team Moneymaker -- which is part of a few new projects he’s developing, among them the PS Home Game. And the good news for those of us in the U.S. who aren’t able to play real money games, his Home Game is for play chips.

I signed up during the afternoon and then participated in the first of a few tournaments Moneymaker scheduled during the evening. Eventually he got his Twitch channel up and running as well, and provided commentary and feedback as we played.

I have to say I got a big kick out of Moneymaker’s stream, especially one time when I mistyped an opening raise with pocket jacks from UTG -- making it nearly 5x the big blind when I had been aiming for just under 3x -- and a couple of minutes later Moneymaker was commenting and making a note on me about my oversized open.

There were only 17 in this first tournament (including “Money800”). I stumbled early on, with none of my steal attempts or c-bets seeming to accomplish anything other than my dribbling away chips. But then I managed to pick up some decent hands and get paid for them, and eventually made it all of the way to having a chip lead with three players left.

Ran into some hard luck at that point -- if I were tweeting my progress, my followers would’ve gotten an “Out. QQ < AQ, then AJ < A8” note like those we’re all always seeing in our timelines -- and went out in third. The buy-in was exactly 1 play chip, my prize for finishing third was exactly 3, but the entertainment derived from those two hours was considerable.

So was the instruction, as I found myself genuinely challenged by certain decisions along the way and appreciating Moneymaker’s advice to players as he talked about bet-sizing and other decisions made by others (and himself) on Twitch.

I believe his plan will be to host Home Games each Monday night at 8 p.m. Eastern time, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a couple of hundred at least taking part -- maybe more -- by the time word gets around and some momentum is built up. If you’re curious, you can join Team Moneymaker here, then join his Home Game using the Club ID 1954662 and Invitation Code TeamMoneymaker2015.