Reviewing the Reviewer

Andrew "Foucault" Brokos, professional poker player, coach, and book reviewer, writes a very interesting article titled "Stop Worrying About Draws" in Card Player magazine (October 17, 2012), the gist of which is that just because there is a potential flush or straight draw on the flop, the likelihood of someone actually having such a draw is not as high as it would appear.

He shows how for different flops the number of possible combinations of potential draws are relatively small compared to the total number of actual possible combinations.

In doing so, however, he slips up a couple of times with his calculations.

"There are six times as many ways to be dealt 9-8 offsuit as 9-8 suited, though admittedly many players will fold the former to a raise."

This is clearly wrong. There are 16 combinations of any 2 different ranks, 4 of which are suited. So there are 3 times as many ways to be dealt 9-8 offsuit as 9-8 suited.

A little further on, Brokos states :

"Two-card straight draws are almost always less likely than two-card flush draws because they require two cards of a particular rank. Whereas any two of eleven remaining hearts (110 combinations) produce a nine-out flush draw on a Th 7h 2c flop, a player must hold one of four eights and one of four nines (16 combinations) to have an eight-out straight draw."

Once again he errs. There are 55 combinations, not 110. Nevertheless, his conclusion is still valid :

"Thus protecting your hand from straight draws is generally less important than protecting from flush draws."

All in all, a thought-provoking article.

Poker Hall of Shame X

At the Venetian, Myrna deals me AcKc and I end up in a pot with 2 other players. The flop comes

9s 9c Tc

It is checked around and the turn is

4c

But wait a minute! The imbecile who is first to act claims that he never checked. Myrna then calls the floor and explains that she didn't know he had a hand. Floor rules that the next (river) card will be the turn card and that the 4c will be shuffled back in the deck and a new river card will be selected. What happened to "significant action" having taken place?

Also note that the imbecile is in Seat 10, I am in Seat 1 and the last to act (LTA) is in Seat 2. So it's not as if I acted out of turn. I only checked when Myrna turned and pointed to me. Needless to say, Seat 1 rarely can see what Seat 10 is doing and relies heavily on the dealer for prompting.

New turn is 6h.

Imbecile checks, I check, LTA checks.

New river is 4d.

Check, check, check.

Both players table KTo and split the pot. Myrna sees my AcKc, sighs and apologizes to me. I say nothing.

Myrna was not paying attention and cost me money. A good dealer should know that there were 3 players in the hand. Had this occurred in Bobby's Room, it could have meant instant dismissal. I am not as critical of the floor decision as I am unfamiliar with the exact criteria for applying "significant action".

Beware of the hidden gutshot

I raise with AKs in late position and the big blind is the only caller. We see a flop of

A K 3 (rainbow)

Bingo! Pretty safe flop for me so let's slowplay this and not chase away our quarry.

BB checks as do I.

Turn is a harmless 2.

BB checks again so it's time to start trying to extract something from this hand.

I bet and get checkraised. WTF?! The bastard is surely making a play. Apart from a set, I don't see any other threat so I push.

BB insta-calls, river is a useless 8, and I am shown 54s for the wheel.

The House of Pain

It was rare to see so many grizzled veterans sitting at the poker table with their mouths agape, yet this is what happened at the Bellagio the other night.

Normal raised pot preflop with 2 protagonists, followed by a rainbow flop of K 7 3.

Postflop action was bet, raise, re-raise, all-in, call.

The board then ran out to (K 7 3) T J.

Following protocol, the called all-in sheepishly tabled AQ for the nut straight, while the other guy just stared in disbelief, throwing his AK faceup into the muck.

As the dealer was pushing the huge pot and before we all recovered, the young nerdy gentleman sitting next to me had already keyed in the hand into his smartphone app and whispered, "Geez, AK was 98.1% favorite on the flop!"

Yeah, that's sure to give me some comfort next time I get sucked out on when only a 93% favorite.

We chose this path

I have no one to blame for the sick feeling I have in the pit of my stomach but myself. The greasy sack of shit in the 2 seat who called my huge all-in raise with an open ender despite the terrible odds, and the prick of a dealer with a shaved head who so conveniently conjured up the requisite suckout card, are simply nausea-inducing lowlifes that come with the territory, and shouldn't really affect me. Yet every so often there is a perfect confluence of circumstances whereby my well-entrenched embracement of variance seems to vanish. Like at the Aria now.

Poker Hall of Shame IX

On Sunday I played for 6 hours at the MGM Grand poker room, not by any means a long session for me. They have a cheap, primitive, non-swivel, non-adjustable chair, the designers of which deserve to be publicly flogged. Today my buttock muscles were sore for the first time in the 10 years that I've been playing poker in Las Vegas. I'm walking around like I've shat myself.

Howard Lederer breaks his silence

The Lederer Files, a video interview Howard Lederer did with PokerNews, was released this week. The 7-part series can be seen on YouTube.

Throughout this whole saga, my policy has been to refrain from any serious commentary that could jeopardize the prospects of the players getting repaid, and I continue to keep the Full Tilt ad on my blog to this day. Anything I had to add was usually of a lighthearted nature. In keeping with this practice, I present some choice snippets from the Lederer Files :

A Big Thank You!

Without going into exact details (though it does involve a rather nasty bad beat), I dove headfirst into the Grand Canal at the Venetian late last night. I would like to personally thank Greg, the quick thinking and courageous young gentleman who jumped in and saved me from almost certain drowning.

Career update

Unfortunately, Big Six Wheel dealer training is proceeding at a very slow pace, much like the motion of the wheel itself. I have no problem with the physical aspects of actually spinning the wheel, nor with the payout calculations. However, I don't see why we have to master such advanced topics as angular velocity, acceleration and kinetic energy, and effects of friction, some of which require solving third-order nonlinear partial differential equations.

Colon hydrotherapy is starting to look good again.

Seven Deuce

Late night session at the Aria and someone suggested we introduce seven deuce to liven things up. Basically, this means that anyone winning with 72, either at showdown or through bluffing, gets paid an agreed-upon sum (in our case $10) by each other player.

The motion was unanimously adopted and naturally the dynamic of the game changed. There were several big pots where players holding 72 risked large amounts of money just to be able to table their bluff and reap the additional $80 reward. I wasn't so bold but did manage to win the $80 when I called a button raise with 72 in the BB, and took the small pot down on the turn.

Here is an example of a well-executed 72 bluff :





Sometimes, however, things get out of control :

Pass the Sugar

The Aria dealer notices that Seat 6 and Seat 7 are having a conversation in a foreign language even though they are not in a hand.

"English only at the table please," requests the dealer.

I crack up laughing, having already identified the "foreigners" as Australians as soon as they had sat down.

"We were speaking in English," responds one of the Aussies.

The dealer, a native-born American, still looks puzzled and, amid bursts of laughter, I assure him that it was indeed English.

Ex Libris Subliminalis

I have heard good things about these 2 books:

Quantum Poker by Derric Haynie and

Playing the Player by Ed Miller

and will soon be adding them to my collection. I find it best to wait for the second edition, which usually has fewer errors and typos than the first, not to mention the inevitable price reduction.

The debasement of poker terminology

"That's not a knife, THAT'S a knife!"

-- Crocodile Dundee

The other day I was on the giving end of a bad beat when I decided that my AKo was good enough to get involved in a preflop raising war between 2 other LAG's. We ended up all-in 3-handed with the following holdings (and preflop equity) :

LAG #1 : As Ah (93.1%)

LAG #2 : Ad Kc (3.6%)

Myself : Ac Ks (3.2%)

Much to the dismay of everyone present, I took down the huge pot with a club flush. THAT is a bad beat.

Matt Matros, a player with a strong math background who I highly respect, talks about his WSOP experiences in Card Player (August 8, 2012). He recounts a hand where his KK was all-in preflop against AKo and an ace came on the river. This is a 70:30 situation and on a bad beat scale of 1 to 10, I would give it a 5. Yet he refers to it as a "huge beat" and a "vicious beat". Later on he describes losing a preflop all-in with his A9o vs. QJo as a "bad beat". This is a 57:43 scenario, sometimes loosely referred to as a coinflip, hardly a bad beat.

Wendeen the teaser

US players with account balances on Full Tilt have been given more food for thought as to the prospects of seeing 100% of their funds with this teasing tweet by industry insider Wendeen Eolis. In her last tweet on this very subject, she spoke of a "cloudy forecast".

Schadenfreude and Planet Hollywood revisited

For reasons best left unsaid, I found myself playing poker for the first time in many years at Planet Hollywood on Friday night. I don't particularly like the "room" as it is just a roped off open area surrounded by drunk screaming girls and a generous oversupply of loud music. Communication between players and dealer is done through shouting and, when necessary, with sign language.

Tonight, 24 hours after the event, as I was reading grrouchie's blog I happenstanced upon a link to another blog and after some reading realized that I had actually played with this blogger on Friday night, although I didn't know it at the time. It was no other than Stump, a very amiable young fellow who was seated to my right. I have added his link to my blog list and suggest you take a look.

One lowlight was when I managed to get a straight flush which is normally rewarded by a $200 high hand bonus, provided there is at least $10 in the pot. I was heads-up with a young imbecile who, despite my obvious prompting and hinting, refused to call my $5 bet (which I would have gladly returned to him plus some) to bring the pot over $10, thus denying me the $200 bonus. I let him know my feelings in no uncertain terms, but as it so often happens with the mentally challenged, he couldn't comprehend what had just occurred and refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing or mistake on his part.

A couple of hands later, this very same cretin lost his $200 stack when his turned nut flush was rivered by a boat. As he sat there stunned, I vocally made it known that I was very pleased at the result by shouting "very, very nice hand" at least 4 times to the victor, standing up and applauding while doing so. Fuckstick then slowly left the table accompanied by some subtle, albeit crude, farewell parting shots from yours truly.

PokerStars settles with DOJ and acquires FTP

After many months of rumors, today (Tuesday, July 31, 2012) the online poker community finally received the official news it had been eagerly anticipating. PokerStars issued the following press release :

PokerStars today announced that the Company has reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Southern District of New York. As part of the settlement agreement, PokerStars has also acquired the assets of Full Tilt Poker, and has committed to the full reimbursement of Full Tilt Poker customers outside the United States.

The total amount to be paid by PokerStars is USD$547 million which will be payable over a period of three years. The money paid to the US Government will in part be used to reimburse former Full Tilt Poker customers in the United States, through a remission process to be administered by the Department of Justice. PokerStars repaid all amounts owing to its own U.S. customers shortly after it closed its U.S. operations.

PokerStars will also make available in a segregated bank account, all outstanding balances owing to all non-U.S. customers of Full Tilt Poker (an amount totalling USD$184 million), with no restrictions on withdrawals, within 90 days of completing this transaction. PokerStars has remained open for non-U.S. players, with all its licenses in good standing, without interruptions.

Under the agreement with the Department of Justice, PokerStars does not admit to any wrongdoing. Furthermore, the agreement explicitly permits PokerStars to apply to relevant U.S. gaming authorities, under both PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker brands, to offer real money online poker when State or Federal governments introduce a framework to regulate such activity.

PokerStars plans to re-launch Full Tilt Poker in most markets as a separate brand, following the appointment of a new, independent management team. Full Tilt Poker’s operations will continue to be run from Dublin, but regulatory oversight will be transferred to the Isle of Man. Further details of these plans will be announced shortly.

Intra-hand equity-mood swings

I have AhQs and call a young guy's pre-flop all-in. He tables Ac5d, making me the 72% favorite. Stoic discipline prevents me from showing any signs of elation. He appears disappointed.

Flop : As 7h 5c

The bastard outflops me and his 2 pair now makes him the 73% favorite. Stoic discipline prevents me from showing any signs of dejection. He appears ecstatic.

Turn : 7s

Bingo! His 2 pair is counterfeited and I catapult into the lead as the 87.5% favorite. Stoic discipline prevents me from showing any signs of euphoria. He appears crestfallen.

River : 7d

We split the pot and prepare for the next round.

Full Tilt PokerStars Deal Done?

Unconfirmed report from Wendeen Eolis that negotiations between PokerStars and DOJ are complete :

Breaking News: The ups and downs and glitches in negotiations between PokerStars and the United States Department of Justice with respect to Full Tilt Poker have come to an end.

Without giving away the identity of a consistently impeccable resource, it is now safe to say announcements for public dissemination are in the works. At this point I am ready to go out on a limb; FTP customers will see their monies well in time for Christmas shopping.

Poker Player Newspaper's print edition goes to press before I can provide further details, rest assured the story is a thriller that will be told.

WSOP leaves town

No need to phone in and put my name on the list. Vegas poker rooms are empty shells of their former selves. WSOP and Deep Stack flotsam, the source of many weeks of pre-flop all-ins, shameful calls, and exhausted chip runners, are now but a distant memory.

How much is that? WTF !?!?!

2/5 at the V. I pick up KdTd on the button and limp in with 2 earlier callers, to be joined by the SB and BB. 5-way unraised action with genial Joseph about to deal the flop and yours truly on the button; what could possibly go wrong?

The flop is Kh Jd 9d giving me top pair and the second nut flush draw, not to mention straight flush and gutshot straight draws.

It's checked around to me and I bet $20. Everyone folds except BB, a local regular who calls and has me covered.

The turn is 6d, giving me the 2nd nut flush. BB checks, I make it $45, BB calls.

The river brings a harmless 5s. BB checks again and I go all-in with my remaining $150.

BB looks at the chips I have just pushed across the line, and then asks Joseph, "How much is that?" As he counts out his chips, I am already mentally stacking the chips in the pot that are soon to be pushed my way.

As soon as BB calls and even before he slides his chips over the line, I immediately expose my hand, not wishing to prolong his agony any further. He looks at my cards and then turns over Ad3d, the nut flush.

I decide not to say anything at the table, get up and leave. 20 minutes later I catch up with BB, who is on a break away from the table. I shake his hand and say, "Nice hand. But when I'm all-in and you've got the nuts, why do you ask How much is that ?"

"I'm sorry, I made a mistake, I shouldn't have," he replied and repeated it again. I know this regular and accepted his apology.