Some Poker Thoughts

Whenever I lose a hand (or when I see somebody else lose a hand), I like to examine the situation and try to figure out why the hand was lost.  By far the most frequent reason why somebody loses a hand (at least as it seems to me) is because they get involved pre-flop with inferior cards.  A small pair from mid position . . . two high cards from early position . . . garbage from the button . . . kicker problems compared to your later-position caller.  All these fall into the category of being just too darned loose pre-flop.  After the hand is lost, the loser feels they have been outdrawn or unlucky; but really what happened is that they went to war with inferior weapons.

That's why I will almost always fold an Ace in mid or even late position when somebody else has entered the pot.  I've written about this before; my Ace-Six in middle position is beat when there are four other folks in the pot and an Ace flops.  So why even force yourself to make those tough post-flop decisions?  Just let it go; your investment is zero; wait for a better hand.

It really surprises me how many folks think they are the next Daniel Negreanu or Freddy Deeb or Gus Hansen, and call a pre-flop raise with Eight-Six offsuit.  The pros know how to get away from a bad hand like this post-flop when they are beat.  I don't, and most of the folks I play against don't either (even though they think they do).

And don't even get me started on complete donkeys who hold onto a nice pre-flop pair such as Queens or Jacks, or even Kings, and continue to bet like crazy after an Ace flops and they're beat.  If I have Queens pre-flop on a board with an Ace, I'll fold it so fast you won't even realize what happened.  It is truly appalling how many poker players can't do that.

===========================================

I've been making plans to visit Foxwoods next month while I'm in Cambridge on business.  It's made me think about my last trip there, and how enjoyable it was.

I showed up around 10:00 am to play some $2/$5 no-limit.  There wasn't a seat open, so I put my name on the waiting list.  Soon, they had so many folks waiting for that game that they decided to open up a brand new table, so I sat down at it with eight others and played all day.

I left around midnight, which is a decent 14-hour session.  Everybody else who opened the table with me had already left, except for one guy who was still playing.  When I got up to leave, he also decided to leave, so we walked up to the cashier cage together to cash in our chips.

As we were walking up there, he said, "You know, I have been watching you play now for 14 hours, and I was never able to figure out what hand you had whenever you were in the pot.  I could just never figure it out.  Whenever you showed down, I was always wrong in my guess.  You always played differently than how I expected."

I thought that was a really nice thing for him to say.  He didn't have to say that.  (I suppose maybe he says to everybody just to butter them up.)

Table image is important, but sometimes it just doesn't matter.  I remember one time I was at a cardroom in Shoreline (the Hideaway I think it was).  It was a $4/$8 limit game.  I don't really like to play that kind of game because the rake will just kill you (I wrote about that earlier also) but I guess you could say I was out "slummin" that day and just didn't care.

The players were atrocious.  It's the kind of game where the way to win is just to be patient and wait for a good hand, and when you end up with the nuts just value-bet like crazy.  So that's what I was doing -- fold, fold, fold, fold.  The folks at the table were joking about it.

Then I get dealt pocket Aces, under the gun.  I bring it in for a raise.  A guy in middle position chuckled and said, "You had to brush the dust off those chips before you could bet, didn't you?"  He said this while he was putting in his chips for a call!  Of course, I won the hand, after betting (or re-raising) each street and letting him call.  He showed King/Jack which paired the Jack on the flop.  Astonishing.

Finally, some Poker to talk about!

Since I've gone so long without playing any poker (or writing about any hands I've played), I will post three hands today.  Usually, it takes me awhile to get back into the groove of playing good poker; but this time I guess I got right back on the bicycle and took off from where I left.

This is all $2/$5 No-limit hold-em.

The first hand, I was in second position.  The first position folded.  I looked down -- hello!  Two Aces, spade and heart.

Now I am more than happy to take the pot right there with Aces.  I think Stu Unger said that with pocket Aces you either win a small pot or lose a big one; and my experience has definitely confirmed that.  So, with Aces (or Kings or Queens or Jacks), I will almost never slowplay.  I go straight for a raise, hope everybody folds (or that I get a maximum of one caller), and move to the next hand.  So I made it $15 to go.

Everybody folded around to the big blind, who called.  I was okay with one caller.

The flop came Ace of clubs, Three of spades, Ten of hearts.  My opponent checked.

Now, this is probably the best possible flop for me.  Whenever I flop a set, I pretty much never slowplay.  Usually the set seems to come with a coordinated board -- flush or straight draws.  But this board seemed pretty safe, unless my opponent was playing with something like King-Queen.  I gambled that a free card would be safe, so I checked behind.

The turn was the Ten of spades.  Now I had a Full House!

At this point, my opponent bet $15 into a $32 pot.  The only thing I could be afraid of here would be pocket tens, and if that's the case, I'm going broke (he had me more than covered).  But it seemed more likely to me that he was on some kind of draw -- straight or flush -- or maybe he'd made his straight or had a ten for trips.  Just in case, I didn't want to scare him away so I just smooth-called.

The river was the Queen of Hearts.  How wonderful -- whatever draw he was on came in.

The pot was $62.  He bet $40.  Time to spring into action.  I raised to $120.  He re-raised to $265, and I went all-in for about $620.  He insta-called.

I showed my Aces for the boat.  He had King/Jack of spades for the Broadway straight and a flush draw.  I dragged in a pot of nearly $1250.

As I evaluate this hand, I don't think I could possibly have played it any better.  As far as my opponent's play goes, I'm okay with it up until the river.  I probably would have bet a smaller amount, and if raised would probably have just called.  I'd like to say I'd have folded to a raise, but I don't think I could have.  So, his mistake as I see it was going into a raising war and donking off all those extra chips.

The next two hands go together.  They were both against the same opponent, and the first one totally set up the second.  My opponent was a pretty good player for the most part, and the way I played these hands was quite risky but it paid off.

The first of these hands, I was in the cutoff.  It was folded around to me.  I looked down and saw Ace of clubs/Jack of spades.  Not a good hand at all, but if nobody else wanted to take the pot I decided I would try to.  I brought it in for $15.  The button -- my opponent -- was the only caller, so with a $37 pot we went to the flop.

The flop was Five of spades, Queen of spades, Ten of diamonds.

Ugh.  I have a gutshot straight draw (with the King) but basically this is the sort of hand I'm ready to give up on.  Essentially, I'm hoping -- begging -- that my opponent will put out a bet so that I can just fold the garbage I'm holding.

I checked, and he bet $5.  Now, that's not even a real bet.  Assuming I have four outs, my chances of winning at this point are around 17%; and the pot is laying me (barely) a bit more than that.  I was compelled to call.

The turn was the Jack of hearts.  So, now I have second pair on a board that is straightening; again I'm ready to fold.  I check; again he bets $5 into a $47 pot.

Finally, I realize he actually has nothing and that I'm playing with the best hand.  I call the $5.

The river is the Six of hearts.  The pot is $57.  I bet $30 -- just over half the pot.  After a long pause, my opponent calls.  He has the Ace of diamonds and Ten of hearts for a pair of Tens; my turned pair beats his flopped one and I pull in a pot of $112.

The second hand unfolds almost exactly the same way.  This time, I am the big blind.  My opponent is again to my left, under-the-gun.  By the time the action gets to me, he and two others have completed the big blind.  I have Jack of hearts and Nine of spades and just check my option.

The flop comes Queen of spades, Ten of spades, Ace of hearts; so I flop a very vulnerable open-ended straight draw.

The small blind checks; I check; my opponent minbets $5 into the $20 pot.  It's folded to me, and I call.

The turn is the Five of spades -- garbage.  I check; he minbets $5 again, I call again.

The river is the Queen of hearts.  I basically have a jack high hand.  But this board is a carbon-copy of the last board I had with this opponent, the one where I had slowplayed the winning hand.  If I played this hand the same way (and so far I had), would I be able to win it with the bluff?

I bet $30 in the $40 pot, and my opponent instantly folded.

Frankly, I don't bluff very often -- I hardly need to to win at poker against the folks I usually play -- but it really did work out here, and I am very pleased at how I played this hand.

Over a week of No Poker !!!

I really hate to be away from poker for such a long time.  And it nearly always happens just as I start to find myself "in the zone" poker-wise.  I'm making really good reads; betting just the right amounts; folding when I'm beat and raising when I'm not, etc.  Then, I take a long break . . . and when I get back to it, I have to start all over again from (what feels like) zero.

So I don't have any new poker stories to share.  I guess I will talk about the World Series some more, and some poker I have coming up.

One of the things I found myself doing during the WSOP, particularly since I was so short-stacked almost the whole time, is looking at the tournament clock and determining how much time was left in the level we were playing.  I started to ask myself whether I would be able to survive to the next level, as if that were the goal I had set.  I realized that I was playing around four hands each hour, and winning three of them, and that was enough to keep my chip stack stable.  Four hands an hour isn't much; it lets you play really tight.

===========================================

Here's a shout-out to my coworker Jon, from Boston.  He played in a NL rebuy tourney at Foxwoods last month and finished 6 out of 91 for a $1300 payday.  Congrats Jon!

===========================================

Meanwhile, I am headed to Boston myself in mid-September for a nine-day series of meetings and classes at HQ.  During the weekend of 9/13, I will head down to Foxwoods and spend the weekend there.  I've done that before during long trips back to HQ.  I'm trying to talk Jon into going out there too.  He's more of a stud player but as you can see from above he's decent at NLH also.

Some more WSOP tidbits

I haven't posted anything for awhile, mainly because I haven't been playing much poker lately!  After a week and a half in Vegas, the pile of things that need my attention has grown so large that I can hardly dig myself out.  So in the meantime I will spend some time sharing some more details about what the WSOP was like.

(I've found that no anecdote is too trivial to hold the interest of my friends who have been asking me what it was like.  I was afraid after a few hours of stories that I was going to have to start making some things up!)

The World Series truly was an international affair.  At my table were people from Greece, France, Sweden, Luxembourg, Canada, Japan, and a few other places.  One young guy at my table spoke fluent English, Greek, and Swedish!  What an odd combination.

The Greek guy at my table was this old fart who spent a lot of his time complaining about Scandinavian players.  He thought they were too loose and aggressive, making too-large bets.  He bitched so much that I really started to get annoyed.  When he finally busted out, I thought, "Serves you right you racist bitch."  He had accused me of being Scandinavian when we first sat down; I told him I was more German than Scandinavian but if I had known what a jerk he was, I would have said, "Yeah I'm Norwegian," just to piss him off.

The Luxembourg guy sat down (in the Greek's vacated seat, in fact) and offered to share his gum with us all.  He was very excited, his first trip to America and he found this extraordinary gum!  I took a look at it and said, "Dude, that's Rolaids."  He didn't know what that was -- nor did most the rest of the table!  So I said, "It's an antacid."  Still no response.  So I said, "If you eat something spicy and your tummy hurts, you take a Rolaids and it makes you feel better."  The whole table got a laugh out of that; the Luxembourg guy laughed the most of all.

I spent the entire first day in the main room, the "Amazon" room, and stayed at the same table.  Over half of the folks at my table busted out during that day, but I hung in there.

The second day, I drew a terrible draw.  They put me in a satellite room called "Brasilia".  This room had something like 68 tables in it, and I was at table 63.  They were breaking the tables from highest to lowest to fill other short-handed tables, so before lunch they broke my table and I had to move to another one -- still in the Brasilia room.  It was like table 57.  Naturally a few hours later, my table broke again, and I moved to Brasilia 34.  I'm not going to claim that all of this moving around affected my chances, but it was rather distracting and it did prevent me from developing a consistent image.  At least I can take comfort -- and I do, too -- that at no table was I the first player to bust out.

Near the end of my remarkable run, I looked around the room, and I saw Gus Hansen at the next table, Men "The Master" at the table next to that, and Alexander Kostritsyn the table next to that.  I couldn't believe that I was in that company -- or, even more, the other big pros that had already busted out!!

I asked myself at one point, "What in the world makes you think you can play this game at this level with the Big Boys?"  I immediately realized the answer:  The fact that I can!

Other things to do in Vegas . . . and a shout-out

There are other things to do in Las Vegas besides just hang out at the casino and win (or lose) thousands of dollars.  So here is my Top Five list of things to do in Vegas which don't involve gambling:

1. Eat breakfast at the Golden Gate casino downtown.  They have a dumpy little diner in the back with cheap, good, and completely nondescript food.  Sometimes I'll even drive all the way downtown from the Strip just to have breakfast there.
2. The buffet at the Rio.  It's probably the biggest . . . it might just be the best.
3. The buffet at the Fremont, downtown.  Not as big as the one at the Rio, but I really like it.  Plus, they have a soft-serve ice cream machine!

Hmm . . . I see that my list of things involves a lot of eating.  Maybe we'd better do some exercise now.

1. Walk the Strip, all the way from the Mandalay Bay to the Sahara (or even the Stratosphere if you are really inspired).  This was a lot more fun when the Frontier and the Stardust were still standing.  This little jaunt can take me all day, as I tend to pop into some of the casinos/bars/restaurants along the way just to see what's happening.  For people-watching though, this stroll is hard to beat.
2. Watch the Fremont Street Experience display show downtown.  Okay, not really.  It's so appallingly lame that I can barely watch it for 15 seconds without wanting to flee.  But watching the people who are watching the show can be entertaining.  It's a tragedy to realize that this tacky show may be the highlight of these people's lives.

There is, however, a lame guilty pleasure on Fremont that I do enjoy.

There's a slot place squeezed in between the Golden Gate and the old Pioneer Club that sells $1 Margaritas (I forget the name of the joint).  Out front above the door they have this jumbotron that advertises the Margaritas.  It is an endless loop commercial of different people and characters (George Washington, Mona Lisa) enjoying the drinks, while the words superimposed on the images advertise the product.  I first saw this same sequence on my first visit to Vegas 15 years ago . . . and it was probably 15 years old even then.

Anyhow, one of the scenes is of this dog, a pit bull terrier, cocking his head left and right, while a cartoon Margarita glass glides across the screen.  I'm a sucker for dogs, and this little scene just cracks me up every time I see it.

There is one other thing that's fun to do in Vegas, but you need to be adequately prepared (it is the desert after all) and the weather has to be cooperative (not too hot, not too windy).  That's go hiking.  There are some decent hiking trails around the city and it's worth trying some of them.

===========================================

Now, a shout-out to my poker comrade Thom.  We both played in a home game last night, a tournament hosted by Poker John at the Poker House in Kent.  It's always a lot of fun to play these games.  Unfortunately, I ended up out of the money, and it was Thom who finished me off.  Nursing a perilously short stack and being on the button, I had a Jack-Five offsuit.  It was folded all the way around to me, so I pushed.  Thom, in the big blind, called with King-Jack (naturally the right thing to do).  The board was irrelevant, and I was out.  I went upstairs to the cash game and managed to nearly make up my entire buy-in in an hour's time, something that's hard to do in a game that was 25c/50c!

Meanwhile, Thom went on to win the tournament.  I am not surprised, he is a good player.  But the competition was pretty fierce.  If I understand it correctly, I think the heads-up was against Robert who is one of the best players in the group.  So congrats to Thom for a well-earned win.

Definition of a Cold Deck

Sometimes I think that the sign of a good poker player isn't necessarily how much he wins at the table; but how little he loses.

Here's an experience at the $1/$3 NL table at Caesar's one morning last week.  I woke up with pocket Queens.  My opponent had pocket Aces.  He won.  The very next hand, I got pocket Kings.  A different opponent got the Aces.  He won.  Before the button had finished its orbit, I got pocket Jacks.  A third opponent this time got the Aces and won.  After that hand, I had to get up and walk away . . . I was just too bewildered.

As far as the question of good/bad poker player goes, you tell me:  I started the session with $700 and finished with $500.  I lost $200 at that table, but easily could have gotten felted -- three times!

I really hope that I don't have anything like that happen to me again!

World Series Conclusion

Well by now just about everybody knows that I went out midway through Day Two.  For the record, my last hand was King-Jack offsuit.  I went all in and was called by the player to my right, who had a pair of Tens.  The board was irrelevant.

I had made a prediction before the Series started, which I only shared with a very few people because I didn’t want to jinx myself.  But after making a brutally frank assessment of my tournament skill and expertise, this was what I concluded:

• ·         I would make it to Day Three, but just barely.
• ·         I would make it through about ¾ of the field.
• ·         I would finish out of the money.

The last two predictions were spot on.  I didn’t make it to Day Three, but that’s because I didn’t expect the field to thin so quickly.  So I had a pretty accurate assessment of my chances, for what that is worth.

I had a sort of Zen-like epiphany during the final break before I got knocked out, which will probably sound kind of goofy when I commit it to paper but it actually was a pretty incredible realization at the time:

It’s not about how many chips you have.

It’s not about making it into the money, or how much you make.

It’s all about playing good poker!

If you play good poker, consistently, you will win your share of tournaments and earn your share of the money.  Just make good decisions, one at a time.

One of my childhood heroes was Coach Tom Osborne, former head football coach at the University of Nebraska.  Even though he consistently coached one of the nation’s very best football teams year after year, he never set as a goal for his players to win a certain game or defeat a certain team.  The goal he wanted his players to have was always to play the best game possible.  To give the best effort you can, each play.  He realized that, given the talent of his players, if each of them played the best that they possibly could, then his team would win their share of games overall.

I think that works in poker too (or any other endeavor, for that matter).  Just do the best you can, one play at a time, and your decision-making will be rewarded over time.

Again, it sounds goofy now that I have it on paper, but so what, it’s my blog so I can put whatever I want in it.

As far as the rest of my trip went, well, what can I say, it was extremely successful.  I basically paid for my trip with what I earned at the poker table (not counting the WSOP of course, but I had saved up for that separately).

I entered one particularly interesting tournament at Harrah’s, after I was knocked out of the WSOP.  It was a “bounty” tournament, which is something I’d never played before.  The buy-in was $100, but you got $10 back for each player you knocked out.  I knocked out eight players (there were 46 total), so I almost made back my buy-in just on bounties alone!  I finished in third place, which was a pretty pleasant confirmation of my abilities to still play good tournament poker.

I’ll be posting more feedback about Vegas, the series, and other stuff in the days to follow.