Poker Grump

Live by the 2-4, die by the 2-4

2009-11-04T04:44:00.000-08:00

I have noted often here that not only has the Mighty Deuce-Four* been good to me in terms of profit, but I have never lost a big pot to somebody else playing it against me. I have frequently thought that sooner or later it was going to happen. Last night it finally did.

I was at Caesars Palace. My first 2-4 hand went perfectly. I was up against a pretty good player, a young woman who looked and sounded almost exactly like Vanessa Rousso, complete with designer shades. I limped in from early position with 2c-4d, then called her button raise to $10. The flop was 3-5-10 with two hearts, giving me an open-ended straight draw. I check-called $15. She was an aggressive player (mostly appropriately so, not maniacally), and always made continuation bets, so I didn't necessarily put her on much. The turn was a 4, giving me a pair and therefore more outs to win even if she had an overpair. She bet again. She and I had been involved in two pots before, both of which had gone exactly the same way: Me on a draw, check-call the flop, miss the turn, check-fold to her second bet. So I was not surprised that she bet again. That history made me decide to call again ($40), because she could easily think that I had nothing but a flush draw and would fold as I had in our prior clashes, when she priced me out of continuing to chase. River was the 4h, giving me trip fours. I had about $115 left and the pot was about $130. I shoved. She tanked. She asked, "Did you really call me down with the heart draw?" She eventually concluded out loud that I had not done so (good read, so far as it went...) and called, showing A-A. I win. I had her covered by just a few bucks. She and her friend both left the game, muttering epithets about the idiot who had played 2-4 that way.

That broke up the table, which had already lost three players in rapid succession before. I was moved to a new table. Unfortunately, I ended up to the right of a classic drunk maniac, who was raising nearly every hand, betting every flop, turn, and river. He was getting ridiculously lucky and winning with the most amazing trash when called down, and successfully bluffing when not called (and giddily showing it every time). He was sitting on $600+ when I arrived.

In such situations, absent some strong physical tell, you pretty much just have to pick a spot that looks good and go with it, recognizing that he might have something that beats you that you can't possibly put him on. Well, long story short, I ended up in a monster pot against both him and a player between us whom I correctly read for a flush draw that didn't get there. I had no clue what the maniac had been raising and betting with, but my 9-9 seemed likely to be good on an all-baby board. Unfortunately, the flop had been 4-4-8, and this time he was playing the Mighty Deuce-Four. I lost about $200 on that hand, after check-raising his flop bet, then calling him on the safe-looking turn and river. The trapped third player, of course, swelled the pot and made calling even more irresistible.

Prior to that, I had already lost back my day's profit on this new table. That hand reduced me to about $90 of my original $300 buy-in. Fortunately, I recovered quickly. Just four or five hands later I saw A-A, limped in and got the expected big raise from the maniac--to $18, I think. Another player shoved for $44. The guy to my right called, and looked to me as if he had been planning the limp-reraise trap of the maniac just as I had been. I shoved, the maniac called, and the guy to my right called for a little less than I had. He had A-K. The short stack had a small pair. Maniac never showed. A-A held up, and I was back to about my original buy-in.

My friend F-Train arrived soon after this and I told him the tale in brief. He said that such things were to be expected; if 2-4 is a good hand, it's good for everybody, not just me. I disagree. I certainly don't mind other people learning of its power and making money with it--I'm not selfish here--but I think that my discovery of the hand should give me immunity against it. It should be kind of like when you sell somebody a property in Monopoly with the proviso that they give you free rent when you land on it for the rest of the game. Other people are welcome to fatten their poker bankrolls with the 2-4, but I should get "free rent" against the it for life as my reward for unveiling it to the poker world.

It seems only fair.

*See here for a recent story of somebody other than me referring to the 2-4 this way. But do not read if you are weak of heart: the most powerful hand in poker lost there.

Guess the casino, #316

2009-11-04T01:28:00.000-08:00

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Imperial Palace

Guess the gizmo

2009-11-03T23:03:00.000-08:00

(Warning: No poker content.)

I played at Caesars Palace this evening. While I was there (hint: not in the poker room), I spotted this unusual little device. I had never seen one before--or at least I had not seen one quite like this. I knew almost instantly what it was, but only because of the specific location in which I saw it. Can you discern what this thingamajig is without the contextual clues that I had?

I'll wait a day or two before posting the answer in the comments, though I suspect that somebody out there will figure it out and spill the beans before I get to it. (So don't read the comments unless you're prepared for spoilers!)

More A.C. photos

2009-11-03T22:38:00.000-08:00

I can be such a dodo sometimes. I completely forgot that I had pictures from Harrah's A.C. taken with my real camera out the hotel window. I had downloaded them to their own special folder upon arriving home, then zoned out when I was doing the previous post, and only used the crappy ones from my cell phone camera.

From the hotel window I could see these unusual but kind of visually interesting things (don't really know what they are) on the roof of the adjacent parking garage. Maybe the leaves spread out and join to provide shade when it's sunny, or maybe they're purely decorative. Who knows?

Much better view of the windmills during one of the brief sunny interludes we had in what was mostly unbroken cold, rain, and clouds.

This dome encloses the swimming pool, which becomes a nightclub after hours. It's tropical and kind of pretty inside it. I'm surprised that this sort of thing isn't more common in Vegas. Despite being in the desert, winter gets cold enough that outdoor pools are virtually unusable for a few months of the year. An enclosure like this would fix that problem, as well as counter the intolerable heat of mid-summer.

Harrah's Atlantic City

2009-11-03T14:18:00.000-08:00

I finished my brief Atlantic City trip with Cardgrrl two weeks ago yesterday, which means that my promised report of Harrah's A.C., where we stayed, is now two weeks past promise. Sorry about that.

I suppose that the most general thing to say about the place is that it's perfectly acceptable. It didn't blow my socks off in any way--nothing like, say, the Venetian does when I have stayed there. But I had a quiet, comfortable room without problems and with a nice view. In terms of a hotel, I don't need much more than that. What little time I spend in the room is mostly unconscious, and amenities don't carry a lot of weight with me at that point.

As regular readers know, I'm not much of a gambler, so I can't tell you anything about Harrah's A.C. as a casino--except that it's really big, and an annoyingly long walk from the Bayview Tower to the poker room, which is the only part of the casino I care about.

So how is the poker room? Again, it's perfectly fine. Nothing special, but--and this is uncommon for me--also not a lot to gripe about. But you just know that I'll find something anyway, right?

Here was my first experience: I get my name on the list. A while later I hear it called. I go to the desk. The guy there tells me, "Go talk to David [I'm not sure that was the name, but it doesn't matter]. He'll get you seated." They apparently just assumed that I would know who this "David" was and where he was. I didn't. I had to ask. When I found him, he was quite busy, and I had to follow him around from table to table for a couple of minutes before he got to me. Then he was surprised that I was asking him for a seat, because he hadn't been told that anything was available. It was a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing. He finally found me the seat that had opened up. It was only then that he informed me I'd have to go fetch my own chips for the initial buy-in. It sure would have saved time if somebody--anybody--had told me this beforehand, and I could have had it taken care of while I was waiting. To make it worse, David just said, "Go get your chips from the cage." I had no idea where the cage was. From where I was standing in the poker room, I could see two cage-like windows, but both of them had signs on them reading something like "Race bets only." I asked David where this cage was that he spoke of. He just pointed in the direction of those windows. I told him that it looked to me like those signs were indicating a cashier. He then explained that there is another window around the side of the same area (which wasn't visible from where I was) that was the cage.

In short, everybody seemed to assume that I already knew my way around and knew the room personnel. As a point of customer service, it seems to me a better default position to assume that it is the patron's first time there, rather than that they know all the ins and outs.

I did not at all like how they handled the member card for tracking hours. There are no card readers at the tables, only one at a computer in the center of the room. That means that everything after the initial swipe requires the dealer to call out to the floor person that a player has changed seats or left the game. I can only imagine that that relay system is highly prone to errors and failure. I have no idea if I actually got the proper credit for the hours I put in.

Speaking of hourly credits, I learned that Harrah's A.C. gives 30 "tier points" per hour for playing $1/2 NLHE, and 60 per hour for $2/5 NLHE. That compares to the 28 per hour given by the various Harrah's properties in Vegas for any game. "Tier points" are what give you Gold, Platinum, Diamond (or higher) status, with their associated perks.

There is one seriously strange thing about how this poker room is run. Apparently fills have to be brought by a security team, rather than by a chip runner, another dealer on break, or whatever. This means that they are incredibly slow in coming, and dealers routinely run out of change-making chips long, long before a fill will ever come. The result is that players end up volunteering to go buy--out of their own pockets--$1 chips from the cage, then bringing them back to the table and selling them to the dealer. They do this because otherwise the game grinds to a halt. It's utterly ludicrous and moronic to run things this way. I have no idea what state regulations there might be, if any, that cause things to be done this way, but I could hardly believe my eyes the first time I saw it. That the casino management just blithely allows this insane practice to continue is the most tangible sign I saw there that they just don't care about presenting a professionally run poker room.

The dealers were mostly unremarkable--neither especially great nor awful. But there was one who was truly incompetent, so remarkably so that she deserves to have the following stories told about her, all of which occurred during a single down during the one tournament I played there (Sunday afternoon):

1. She took a full three minutes to get herself signed in. This was largely because she noticed a problem with how the previous dealer had signed the sheet (something about his badge number or employee number or whatever not having been recorded), and spent time trying to fix it for him, while nine players sat there impatiently watching the tournament clock tick by. She seemed completely oblivious to how she was affecting the game and annoying the players by her stupid insistence on fixing that problem right that minute.

2. She was the slowest dealer I saw the whole trip, by a large margin.

3. During one deal the ace of clubs flipped face-up to the under-the-gun player. No big deal--that happens to every dealer occasionally. But how she handled it was inexcusable. She replaced the card as per protocol. But then when that player folded, the dealer took it upon herself to peek at the two mucked cards, then got a look of obvious relief on her face, and said, "That's good." To anybody paying attention, that made it clear that there was not an ace folded there, and probably not two clubs, either. There is no reason whatsoever for that kind of thoughtless dissemination of potentially crucial information. The dealer has no business even knowing what cards a player mucks, let alone hinting to the table what the cards were.

4. There was one giant hand that involved five players and two side pots. This dealer screwed it up beyond all recognition. She just didn't know how to set up two side pots, so she was reduced to taking instructions from the players, who, of course, completely disagreed with each other about how she should do it. It became a mass of confusion. The hand took about ten minutes because of her utter incompetence.

5. The tournament clock had tipped over to the next level while that hand got sorted out. One of the players didn't notice that and put out the previous blind amount. I pointed out that he needed more. He said, "Oh, the blinds went up already?" I joked, "Yeah, we only got that one hand in on the previous level." The dealer heard this and freaked. She stopped in the middle of pitching cards, fixed me in her glare, and said, "Do you want to sit here and do this?" Note that I hadn't said anything about her directly, or why the hand had taken such a long time. But it was an indisputable fact that it had taken a large part of one entire blind level. I couldn't believe (1) that she was being so sensitive about a joke that was nearly literally true and that, additionally, didn't blame or even mention her as the cause, and (2) that she would further slow down the game to complain to me about it, rather than doing the honorable thing and apologizing to the players for having screwed up so badly. So I just stared back at her, curious to see how long she would hold up the action. It was about 30 seconds of her repeating her question to me and me doing nothing but staring back at her, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of engagement, before she gave it up and went back to the task at hand.

This woman doesn't deserve her job. But as I said earlier, she stood out from the pack as the sole example that I saw of somebody who truly was sub-par.

I really had no other meaningful complaints about the room. It was reasonably comfortable, reasonably well-run, pretty good in terms of noise and smoke infiltration from other parts of the casino, readily accessible restrooms, and had the nice touch of drinking fountains for refilling water bottles. I can't say that I loved the place, but if it were in Vegas, I would certainly have little reason to dislike or stay away from it. For a chronic complainer to be able to come to that conclusion, they're doing pretty well.

Many people I have subsequently run into who knew that I took this trip have asked me about the competition. Frankly, I didn't notice any obvious systematic differences between the manner or quality of play between Vegas and Atlantic City. Plop me down blindfolded, and I sure wouldn't be able to say, "Oh, yeah, this table action can only mean we're in A.C." The addition or subtraction of a single player can change the game far more than putting the table down in either Vegas or the east coast. Or, as the statisticians would say, the within-group variation exceeds the between-group variation by a long, long way.

I played $2/5 for the last couple of hours before we got on the bus back home--something I don't do too often. Good thing I did--it turned what would have been a small overall loss on the trip to an overall win. The play was unbelievably passive--even more so than I usually see at $1/2. Cardgrrl, who was at the table with me, later agreed that it was seriously abnormal play for those stakes. She has played a lot of $2/5 in that room, and assures me that that's not how it usually goes.

So the big question: Would I go back? Yes. Absolutely. I very much want to. In fact, I'm already hatching plans. We'll see if I can persuade Cardgrrl to drive up there next time instead of taking the bus, so that we have both more time and more flexibility to visit other cardrooms. When and if we do, you know that I will spill all the details here.

Here's a few bonus photos of the place for you:

I love that this is the artwork most easily visible from a few of the tables in the poker room. Fish! Perfect!

Stepping out the poker room door and finding an ocean is not exactly the norm for Las Vegas casinos. It's an odd but pleasant sensation.

View from the hotel window. In the photo you can just barely see the power-generating windmills in the background. In reality, they were very prominent in the landscape, but the bleak weather, low-contrast light, window reflection, and my general incompetence as a photographer combined to make them almost disappear here.

Poker gems, #323

2009-11-03T14:00:00.001-08:00

Emil Patel, in Card Player magazine interview, November 4, 2009 (vol. 22, #22), p. 41.

You would think that people would start to play a little bit tighter because everyone is playing almost psychotically these days, but I don't really see it. Pretty much everyone combats aggressiveness with even more aggressiveness. In a six-handed game three or four years ago, if you got four-bet preflop, you could easily fold kings in lots of situations. Nowadays, when you get four-bet preflop and have something like A-Q or pocket nines, you get giddy, because it's usually a good situation to be able to get all in.

Guess the casino, #315

2009-11-03T01:27:00.000-08:00

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Green Valley Ranch

Guess the casino, #314

2009-11-02T01:25:00.000-08:00

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Flamingo

Dealers: One funny, one lazy

2009-11-01T17:02:00.000-08:00

I generally like interacting with dealers. It's one of the big reasons that I prefer the two seats on either side of the dealer: I get to chat with them. When there's a dealer I know and trust, I can make comments on how people are playing, share snarky jokes, etc., all in a voice soft enough that it's not likely to be heard by anybody else at the table, unless they're deliberately trying to listen in. I can also quietly point out the common errors or problems that I notice (player being passed over for action, pot not being quite right, misreading a hand, cards getting flashed, or whatever), without having to shout to make myself heard. I don't like being noisy. I don't like being the center of attention.

One of my favorite dealers is Wayne at Mandalay Bay. He's the one that looks like Al Roker. He always brings just the right mix of seriousness and lightheartedness to the table. He is able to keep players smiling even as he keeps the game moving and under good control.

He had two consecutive downs at my table today. When he had been in the box for about 55 minutes, and I assumed he was about to be pushed finally, I realized that I had not won a hand that entire time. So as he was cleaning up the detritus of one hand, I asked him, "Doesn't it say in the Official Dealer's Manual that you're supposed to push a pot to Seat 1 at least once in a while?"

Wayne didn't miss a beat. He replied, "Yes, it does. But right after that it adds: 'With the provision that Seat 1 has to be very, very patient.'"

As they say on "Family Feud," good answer, good answer!

Earlier in his shift, there had been a monster pot in which several people lost a lot of money, and one guy got seriously enriched. I had folded from the small blind, so didn't get hurt. As Wayne was getting ready for the next hand, I told him, "I think I played that hand better than anybody else--I only lost one dollar!" Again, he took no time at all for the zinger in return: "Congratulations. That is a marked improvement!"

I actually laughed out loud at that--kind of a rarity for me at the table.

***********

Sometimes, though, dealers are just annoying because of being inattentive or incompetent or too talkative or a hundred other sins. Last night at Binion's I had one that was startingly lazy.

My usual practice when making a bet is to make a single stack of chips and slide it forward. It's often difficult for an opponent at the other end of the table to see how much the bet is when it's done that way, but that's deliberate. There are bits of information to be gleaned from watching and listening to the other player as he asks the dealer what the bet is, and how he reacts to the answer.

Last night I bet $35, and the other player in the hand asked, "How much is that?" The dealer at that point is supposed to count it out. This doofus, though, instead turned to me and repeated, "How much is that?" It caught me off guard, because I've never had a dealer relay that question to me instead of determining the answer himself. I said, "$35," before I had a chance to think about it. But as the other player was contemplating a call, I got annoyed at the dealer for expecting me to do his job for him, and causing me to speak during a hand, which is against my religion. I decided that I wouldn't do so again.

The player made the call. Turn card came, and this time I slid out $55. Again the player asked, "How much is that?" Again the dealer turned to me and repeated, "How much is that?" This time, though, he was met with stone silence, and was eventually forced--horror of horrors--to actually do his job and count the bet.

I did not run into that problem again thereafter.

Dealers. Give me the funny one over the lazy one anyday.

Million-Dollar Cash Game

2009-11-01T09:43:00.000-08:00

On the blog that used to be called "Poker on TV" and is now called, for reasons that escape me, "Fifth Street Journal" (i.e., I get the title, but I don't understand why the change from the previous perfectly good, perfectly descriptive title), I saw this little note:

An English-language version of Million Dollar Cash Game season 3 has
finally become available for downloading or streaming. The production is
poor, particularly the onscreen graphics, but it's a huge cash game so I'm sure
some of you will want to watch it.

I found a torrent of the first episode and just finished watching it. The blog note was correct: It's really good poker, though kind of crappy production. You've got Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius, Chris Ferguson, Phil Hellmuth, David Benjamine, Tom Dwan, Eli Elezra, and Gus Hansen playing. How could it not be good? On the first hand, Ivey and Antonius agree to go all-in blind for their starting stacks of $100,000 each. The most interesting hand is played out between Dwan and Ferguson near the end of the show.

The commentary isn't anywhere near as good as "High Stakes Poker," but the poker play is of the same high caliber. I'm going to download the other episodes released so far, and I'm also feeling inclined to go back and check out the previous seasons, which have somehow escaped my attention until now.

If you don't already know how to watch such things on your computer, follow the instructions that you'll find linked to in the blog post cited above.

Guess the casino, #313

2009-11-01T01:23:00.000-07:00

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Circus Circus

Halloween on Fremont Street

2009-11-01T00:09:00.000-07:00

I walked down to Binion's, played a little poker, made a little money, then came home. Not a very exciting evening. Well, except for the THOUSANDS of Halloween revelers that I had to press through to get back to my apartment! I took my time and had fun with it, though. You can see the resulting photos here.

Enjoy.

Guess the casino, #312

2009-10-31T01:21:00.000-07:00

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Bill's

Discount tickets

2009-10-30T11:52:00.001-07:00

This is the best information I've seen yet about those discount show ticket outlets that are found all over downtown Vegas and the Strip:

http://www.lvrj.com/neon/for-those-who-want-a-deal-on-a-las-vegas-show-discount-kiosks-can-help-64346322.html

(Hat tip to savelv.com for the pointer.)

Guess the casino, #311

2009-10-30T01:19:00.000-07:00

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Venetian (Thanks to Cardgrrl for the photograph.)

Amazing? Not really.

2009-10-30T00:04:00.000-07:00

At Binion's tonight I was involved in a hand that got checked down on all three betting rounds after the flop. I won it with the low end of a straight. I didn't bet because by the river there were four hearts on the board, I didn't have one, and I was out of position against two other opponents.

When the hands were revealed, a player not involved said, "It's amazing that nobody had a heart!"

Apparently his definition of "amazing" and mine vary by a large degree.

Let's ignore the self-selection that usually occurs with poker hands by sequential betting (i.e., when the flop contains two hearts, players with one or two hearts as hole cards are more likely to continue playing than those with none), because here there was no such filtering action. What we are left with is the question of how likely it is that there is at least one heart to be found among six random cards (the hole cards of three players), given that four hearts are seen among the community cards. I will assume that before the flop, nobody is more selective for playing hearts than for any other suit.

We have 47 cards not on the board, which must include 9 hearts. So any individual card chosen at random has a 9/47 chance of being a heart, or 0.191. We use that as the value of p in a binomial calculation. My favorite binomial calculating tool is here. Using it, I learn that the probability of there being exactly one heart in a randomly selected group of six cards, under the circumstances described, is 0.40, or 40%. The probably of there being exactly two hearts among the six cards is 23%. Three hearts is 7%. Four hearts is 1%. Five and six hearts are vanishingly rare, accounting for only about 0.1% combined, so we can ignore those conditions.

In other words, the combined probability of there being at least one heart among the six down cards held by three players, when there are four hearts on the board, is about 72%. That means that about 28% of the time, none of the three players will have a heart. We experienced a condition that will occur 28% of the time--more than one time out of four. Not exactly a rarity. And this doofus considers that to be "amazing"?

Even if there were four players, and thus eight cards to account for, the probability that nobody has a heart is about 18%--again, not exactly a finding incredible enough to write home about. With five players, it's 12%; with six players 8%, with seven players 5%; with eight players 3.4%; with nine players 2.2%; and with ten players 1.4%. Those last two are about what it would take for me to be impressed that something truly out of the ordinary had occurred. But I still wouldn't call it anywhere near "amazing"--just kind of unusual.

I guess some people are a whole lot more easily impressed by minor coincidences than I am.

Seen at Binion's

2009-10-29T23:27:00.000-07:00

I hadn't played at Binion's in nearly three months, so when it was time to set out for a game this evening and I didn't really feel like driving anywhere, it was the obvious target. (It's a ten-minute walk from my apartment.) Glad I did--it turned into a very profitable session.

I discovered that Binion's has continued its recent trend of issuing commemorative poker chips, as seen above. Labor Day and Halloween are obvious targets. I'm not sure what the third one is commemorating, other than T&A.

At the table I ran into a reader, name of Eric--from Cleveland, where I changed planes on my trip home Monday. (Lovely city--from the air, anyway.) He recognized me because I was wearing the hoodie sweatshirt that Cardgrrl gave me last month. He and I were involved in a hand that proved interesting. He raised from early position. I called on the button with Kh-Qh. Both blinds called, too. Flop was A-K-Q with two diamonds. Small blind bet $10, big blind called, Eric called. I raised to $40. I knew there was a fair chance I was already beat by a higher two pair, a set, or a straight, but I wanted to find out where things stood.

I found out fast. Small blind pushed all in. Big blind folded. Eric moved all in. I decided one of them had a set and the other J-10 for the straight. I folded. I was right on both counts. Unfortunately, Eric's A-A for the flopped top set was in bad shape, he didn't improve to a full house, and left empty-handed. That's the way it goes sometimes. I felt lucky to have escaped losing only $50 or so. It's weird to flop two pair and be in third place, but as it turned out I was drawing dead to running kings or queens for quads, or J-10 for a straight on the board and a three-way chop.

(Eric, I sympathize. If you haven't read this old post of mine, it's probably worth a few minutes of your time. You'll find a very familiar-sounding story there. It was just about the worst 20 minutes of poker I've ever experienced.)

There were other strange and/or interesting things to be seen at Binion's tonight, which I don't think need further commentary, just photos:

Only in Vegas

2009-10-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

I was at the Clark County Library today. As I passed by the shelves of non-circulating reference works, something very familiar caught my eye. There, among the various directories, etc., was Super System: A Course in Power Poker, by Doyle Brunson.

Only in Las Vegas is a poker book considered reference material.

Guess the casino, #310

2009-10-29T01:17:00.000-07:00

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Suncoast

Quads on the turn

2009-10-29T00:24:00.001-07:00

At the final table of the Mookie tonight we witnessed this unusual hand. This screen shot makes it look like I was involved, though I wasn't. I folded pre-flop. I don't remember who else played it, but it was won by a bet on the turn without a showdown.

It made me wonder how rare it is to see four of a kind in the first four board cards. Let's find out, shall we?

As I have discussed before, there are 19,600 possible flops, given that I am holding two cards that are therefore unavailable. How many of these flops will be three of a kind? Well, there are 11 ranks of cards not matching the ones that I'm holding (assuming I don't have a pocket pair). For each of those, there are six possible combinations of the suits that could constitute a single-rank flop. That's 66. I'm going to neglect the other two ranks, because even if the other three come on the flop, it's not going to be quads on the turn as shown in the example hand in question.

66/19,600 = 0.00337, so about three out of a thousand times you'll see a flop of a single rank.

What about the turn being the fourth one? There are now five cards accounted for, so 47 left in the deck. Only one of them fits the bill, so only one time in 47 that we have flopped trips on the board will we then see quads on the turn. 0.00337/47 = 0.000072. Inverting that, the result is that only one time in about 13,958 hands will the cards turn out to have four of a kind on the board at the turn, as shown above.

That's rare enough to be worth gawking at for a moment or two, I think.

I winz another Mookie!

2009-10-28T22:46:00.000-07:00

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Why the end of the world? Because in the course of just five consecutive Wednesdays, I have played the Mookie four times, coming in second on September 30, then winning it on October 7, final table but no cash on October 14, skipped it October 21, then won it again tonight. This is both an unexpected and unprecedented sort of streak for me--so unusual, so inexplicable that it must be considered a sign of the apocalypse. As readers know by now, tournaments aren't really my thing--especially online ones.

I felt like I played reasonably well, though not spectacularly by any means. I got lucky early on and hit all sorts of flops, allowing me to build up a decent stack that kept me afloat through the rocky bits. For example, there was this hand just ten minutes in:

I believe that I only had all my chips in with the worst of it and had to get lucky on two occasions. This next hand was the first of them. VBPro7 had been stealing my blinds relentlessly, so I decided it was time to play back at him:

His call on the flop was either genius or insane--I'm still not sure which. But either way, I got very lucky to catch a six-outer on him.

Here's a mildly interesting hand I played against my friend Cardgrrl:

At the time I made that move, I thought it was possible that she had missed the board completely (and might have just been on a random blind steal to begin with), though I knew that with the pre-flop raise she could easily have a king. When she took so long to decide whether to call or fold, I became convinced that she did, in fact, have a king. (She still hasn't told me, so I don't know.) But I thought had pretty good fold equity even if she did have one pair, and the pair and flush draw gave me plenty of outs in the event that she called.

Of course, it is mandatory that I win at least one hand with the Deuce-Four:

I don't know what Cardgrrl had there, but she claims that she was ahead. (I showed the hand, of course.) Not that it matters, since a 5 was inevitably coming to give me the straight and the win.

Now we're down to the final table, six players left, four to be paid, when this hand comes up against CK:

In the replay it looks like it went quick, but it actually took some time. Unless she was just posturing (which I think unlikely), she had a real decision there. That, plus a cryptic comment in the chat box after the hand (which I showed), gave me the sick feeling that I beat the mighty Deuce-Four there. If so, may CK and the poker gods forgive me! Also if so, phenomenal laydown, CK.

OK, so now we're five-handed, on the bubble, and I'm the second to shortest stack. I remember what Daniel Negreanu said about bubble boys, and I decided to go for the gusto rather than sneak into the money like a little rat. That decision was made much easier when I found QQ in the small blind. The raiser here was the monster stack, and had been abusing the bubble mercilessly (as, of course, he should). But here he made a really questionable call, probably inspired by the thought that he had plenty of chips to spare. The result was to give me a crucial double-up:

A short time later I got my biggest advance in chips of the entire tournament when I flopped a set on an essentially draw-free board, in position against the preflop raiser, who was the only person with enough chips to double me up--in other words, kind of a perfect storm:

But in classic fashion (for me, anyway), I held on to this bounty of chips for a mere three minutes before donking them off. In the interim the bubble had burst:

Sigh. Why must I always have a blow-up like that? It's like I subconsciously feel I don't deserve to have the big chip lead, so I have to find a way to give them to the other players.

Anyway, by the time we got down to the final three of us, I was the short stack, and had my second instance of getting ridiculously lucky after all the money was in:

If I can be legitimately proud of any part of the tournament, it would have to be the heads-up play. I started with a 3:1 chip deficit (78K to 27K), but chipped away at the lead pretty persistently, until I got an opportunity for a big move forward by calling my opponent down with second pair:

One could certainly argue for being more aggressive there, but I was out of position. Furthermore, I believed that Jestocost had been trying to get me to commit all my chips badly and go for the knockout, and I was pretty determined to exercise pot control until I was in a clearly dominating spot. Since I didn't believe he had an ace, with no preflop raise, I was content to play this one passively and cautiously, and it worked out for me.

Just eight minutes later, I got The Big Hand, the one that I had been waiting for, the one that turned it all around:

That was pretty much all she wrote. Then it was just a matter of not getting chip-drunk and blowing it again, but instead waiting for a spot to land the final blow. The chip stacks went up and down a bit, but were close to the same as at the end of that hand when I found what seemed to be a good spot to try for the win:

And that was the end of it.

Nothing about this little streak changes anything. I'm still a mediocre tournament player and mediocre online player. As you can see, I'm still prone to stupid moves. But it's nice to have gotten a little bit of luck to combine with a few moments of my A-game in nearly consecutive weeks of this running tournament series. It's not big money or glory, but I'm pleased with how things have turned out here.

Poker gems, #322

2009-10-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

Alistair Cooke:

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.

The perils of blogging too much

2009-10-28T11:16:00.000-07:00

So I just wrote the previous post. It's up. I'm proofreading it. It occurs to me that I once heard Mike Sexton make the same mistake (saying "reraise" when it was just a raise). I think that that would make a nice extra touch to add to the post. I start trying to see if I can remember which World Poker Tour event it was where I heard Sexton's gaffe. Then another thought starts creeping into the old noggin: Didn't I write a blog post about that when it happened? A quick search reveals not only that I did, but that I did a whole rant about the "reraise" thing back in May, 2008, in which I detailed the circumstances of his comment.

And now I just repeated myself, except that it probably wasn't as good the second time around.

On Sunday I was in a 14-player home tournament with Cardgrrl. I busted out and joined a cash game on the side, while she kept playing. (She won it, not too surprisingly, though she has so far been too modest to note that fact in her own blog.) I lost the biggest pot of the day (something like $70, which was massive, given that the stakes were $0.10/$0.20!) in one of the most annoying ways possible. Four of us checked it around on the river. I had top two pair, but didn't bet because the river put a fourth heart on the board, and I didn't have one. I showed my cards. Two of the others mucked. The last one made a dejected face and pushed his cards forward a few inches, face down, as if to muck. (This is a player-dealt game, and there was no clearly defined muck area.) Just then, a bozo at the far end of the table, not involved in the hand, said, "Nobody has a heart?" The fourth player, apparently not having noticed the four-flush on the board, then picked up his cards again, discovered that he had the ten of hearts, showed, and took the pot.

Why didn't I write a whiny blog post about this at the time? Because it was virtually identical to an incident I related here (fifth story) about a hand at Bill's, just over a year ago. I thought about recounting Sunday's hand in detail, complete with a rant about how such a stray comment egregiously violates the rule about not talking about the hand in progress, as well as the "one player to a hand" principle. (When you help one player in poker, you almost inevitably hurt another at the same time.) But why bother, when I've already done that post before? At least in that case I managed to remember having told the story before.

So this is one of the problems of having been blogging quite prolifically for a hair under three years now. (My first post was made on October 30, 2006. Happy early anniversary to me!) I have already tackled a hefty percentage of all the things I can think of to talk about. New things happen to me at the poker table with a much lower frequency than when I was first in Vegas. It's not exactly true that I've seen it all and done it all, but I've certainly seen, done, and written about a whole helluva lot more than I had back then. There are fewer novel thoughts and novel experiences to share with readers.

That leaves me the dilemma of repeating myself intentionally (figuring that not everybody has been reading all along), repeating myself unintentionally (as happened earlier today), just putting up pointers to an old post with a note like "this happened to me again," or just letting things go silently. I'm not sure that any of those is the optimal solution, though they'll probably all be deployed once in a while.

If you catch me telling virtually the same story a second--or even third--time, forgive me. It might be deliberate. Or it might be senility setting in.

"Reraise"?

2009-10-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

I'm catching up with last week's World Series of Poker broadcast. In one hand, the action on the turn card is Phil Ivey checks, Joseph Ward bets 200K, Ivey check-raises to 600K. But in the voiceover, Lon McEachern says, "Ivey with a reraise here to six hundred thousand."

Reraise? How can there be a reraise when there wasn't a raise first? A raise after a previous raise is a reraise; a raise after a bet is just a raise.

People make this mistake all the time. Somebody bets the flop, and the next player announces, "Reraise." Even people with enough experience to know better screw this up. One of my best friends does it on a fairly regular basis. And I just don't get it. I essentially never announce reraise. There is no situation in which one needs to use it. The word raise works perfectly well for every occasion where reraise is acceptable. So why not just eliminate the unnecessary word from one's working vocabulary, stick to raise for everything, and never risk making an embarrassing mistake?

Guess the casino, #309

2009-10-28T01:15:00.000-07:00

To reveal the hidden answer, use your mouse to highlight the space immediately after the word "Answer" below.

Answer: Santa Fe Station