About 90 minutes ago, I ended more than 4 hours watching an online tournament when I could have been playing. But it was a good time investment, and I learned a lot.
The tournament had an extremely large, and extremely weak, field. What was even more interesting to me was that it had a very good structure. Often very large tournaments will speed up the blinds so that they don't run too long--which is exactly the opposite ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]q2]\ [Psalty just walked across my keyboard] of the structure that I like. But big prize pool, slow blinds, and weak field--that's right in my wheelhouse.
The tournament started with over 111,000 players. It was an $11 tournament, and I know that the field was weak because satellites were runnning 10 or more at a time to get people into this thing, and the satellites were only $2.20. When you have a bunch of people who can't afford to get into a tournament, who try to take down a cheaper tournament to win a seat, that just screams, WEAK FIELD. And since so many satellites were running, 24 hours a day (there are 16 registering right now), I think that most in that huge field earned their tournament spots that way.
When I started watching, there were 131 players left, and the players getting knocked out had finished just high enough to mincash. The blinds were so high that I didn't think that those 131 players would last very long, but when I realized that it would be quite a while, I was learning so much that I decided to stick with it. That took 4 hours and 4 minutes. The entire tournament ran for almost 11 hours.
I analyzed the tournament correctly. Even when it was down to 36 players, they were making basic mistakes. Players were limping (making the minimum bet) when their stacks were so small that the only two choices were to go all in or to fold. There were also players so worried about getting knocked out before the next pay level that agressive players pushed them around mercilessly.
Sometimes just surviving until the next pay level is correct, especially when it's life-changing money. Economists call that marginal utility, when just one more unit of something makes all the difference.
The classic example is that if a person is starving, the marginal utility of one loaf of bread is great. A more contemporary example might be avoiding risk at the poker table, while coasting into enough money to buy a car, or to pay a year of college tuition.
If players had been making that decision with a thousand dollars or more on the line, it might make sense--but jumps that big didn't happen until it got down to the final two or three tables.
In my opinion, the $25-$50 prizes that had players playing carefully after nine hours were not a big deal when the prizes at the final table were so huge. Usually you need a good reason not to take the risks necessary to get to the final table, and the final table money was so compelling in this case that it's not even a close call. Ninth place was $8,418.98. First place was $210,531.74!
So, I watched this extravaganza, and I liked what I saw. The Sunday Storm runs once a week, and I would definitely like to give it a shot. Satellites have their quirks, but they happen to be one of my specialties (I used to play a lot of $2.20s and cash out the ones that I won, adding the $11 to my bankroll instead of entering the target tournament) so I probably wouldn't have any problem taking one down in 2 or 3 tries.
But I'm hesitant to do that yet, for several reasons:
1. I'm not bankrolled to play $2.20s yet. My Consolidated Bankroll Formula tells me that I need $114 in my bankroll to play $2.20s.
2. When I win a satellite, the Sunday Storm buy-in might be better used by cashing out and adding $11 to my bankroll.
3. Variance. No matter how good a player is, there is huge variance when playing in a very large tournament. It's easy to make one big mistake, or to have a run of really bad luck, sometime during an 11-hour tournament. To put it another way, you have to be both lucky and good to go deep in such a large field. And since the Sunday Storm only runs once a week, it would take a long time to play it often enough to reach the long-term, where skill dominates luck.
In any case, I can't play that tournament, or any of the other Sunday Majors, more than twice a month. Starting in April, half of the time I will be gettting up early to go to church on Sundays. Getting up in the morning, going to church, coming home around noon, playing a tournament that starts at 3:30 P.M. and could go for 11 hours--not a good plan. I would definitely prefer to be rested and able to make good decisions when a lot of money is at stake.
4. It's 11 hours! Players didn't start cashing until about 9 hours in. I could easily play 6, 7, or 8 hours and not cash. That's a lot of time during which I could have been doing something else--like making money.
So, it was interesting. I learned a lot about how different players react in an unusual tournament situation. It would be fun to try, and I might have a decent shot at making some serious money if I played it once in a while.
But now is not the right time. The Sunday Storm, and all of the Sunday Majors, will have to wait for a while.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Results for week 3/20-3/26
HOURS
Administrative 2.25
Study 12.00
Play 13.00
-------
27.25
As stated in my previous entry, two storms in one week blew a pretty big hole in my poker playing. I made some of that up with extra study time (I shoot for at least five hours), and studying is the most important thing that I can do. There are players that spend 50% of their time studying, but I need to spend a plurality of my time playing, at least until my hourly rate is high enough that I can play less and study more. I don't see that happening any time in the near future. Right now it's all about the benjamins.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll, 3/20 85.10
Ending bankroll, 3/26 85.90
--------
+$0.80
Not a very exciting number, but I'l take it. I didn't have much time to play, and the 90-player tournaments where I've been making make most of my profit were all but cut out of the week. I played two of them and didn't cash. It takes about four hours to win one of those, and trying to work tournaments around storms and storm warnings doesn't leave a lot of multi-hour windows open for playing.
As far as I know, there isn't anything on my schedule today (Sunday) so when I get up in the afternoon, I should be able to hit it hard and get in some serious hours, probably at least ten. (I track my sessions based on the date that I started playing, so my last Sunday session usually ends sometime Monday morning).
Administrative 2.25
Study 12.00
Play 13.00
-------
27.25
As stated in my previous entry, two storms in one week blew a pretty big hole in my poker playing. I made some of that up with extra study time (I shoot for at least five hours), and studying is the most important thing that I can do. There are players that spend 50% of their time studying, but I need to spend a plurality of my time playing, at least until my hourly rate is high enough that I can play less and study more. I don't see that happening any time in the near future. Right now it's all about the benjamins.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll, 3/20 85.10
Ending bankroll, 3/26 85.90
--------
+$0.80
Not a very exciting number, but I'l take it. I didn't have much time to play, and the 90-player tournaments where I've been making make most of my profit were all but cut out of the week. I played two of them and didn't cash. It takes about four hours to win one of those, and trying to work tournaments around storms and storm warnings doesn't leave a lot of multi-hour windows open for playing.
As far as I know, there isn't anything on my schedule today (Sunday) so when I get up in the afternoon, I should be able to hit it hard and get in some serious hours, probably at least ten. (I track my sessions based on the date that I started playing, so my last Sunday session usually ends sometime Monday morning).
Friday, March 25, 2011
A messed up week (two storms)
I"m down about $4 for the week, which ends tomorrow at midnight, but that's not the issue. I try to win every month, but I know it's not going to happen every week. The main problem has been the weather.
There were two storms this week, a thunderstorm, and what the National Weather Service calls a "winter storm." The first storm knocked power out for 3 hours, but I also didn't play for several hours on either side of the storm. I don't have the bankroll to be putting money at risk when I might lose my internet connection.
The second was part of a "winter storm warning", which promised a combination of rain, freezing rain, snow, and sleet. I know that ice on power lines can cause a lot of trouble, so again I didn't play. Schools were closed, my wife's car door was almost frozen shut, and driving was teacherous. I never lost my connection or power, but again, I didn't want to take the chance of losing my internet connection once money was invested.
The Catch-22 here is that I'm not playing for enough money that paying for redundant or backup systems (backup power supply, air card for my wife's laptop, generator) makes financial sense. One option, once we have an air card, would be to figure out the closest place with 24 hour wi-fi, grab my wife's laptop, and jump in the car.
The problem with that plan is that I really don't want to mess with moving my database to another computer (which is necessary to use the heads-up display, displaying the statistics on opponents I have played against previously). And of course, if power is down, I can't move anything from my desktop.
But if I'm already in a tournament, playing without a HUD would be better than not playing at all. After all, once I've paid the entry fee, what would I have to lose?
There were two storms this week, a thunderstorm, and what the National Weather Service calls a "winter storm." The first storm knocked power out for 3 hours, but I also didn't play for several hours on either side of the storm. I don't have the bankroll to be putting money at risk when I might lose my internet connection.
The second was part of a "winter storm warning", which promised a combination of rain, freezing rain, snow, and sleet. I know that ice on power lines can cause a lot of trouble, so again I didn't play. Schools were closed, my wife's car door was almost frozen shut, and driving was teacherous. I never lost my connection or power, but again, I didn't want to take the chance of losing my internet connection once money was invested.
The Catch-22 here is that I'm not playing for enough money that paying for redundant or backup systems (backup power supply, air card for my wife's laptop, generator) makes financial sense. One option, once we have an air card, would be to figure out the closest place with 24 hour wi-fi, grab my wife's laptop, and jump in the car.
The problem with that plan is that I really don't want to mess with moving my database to another computer (which is necessary to use the heads-up display, displaying the statistics on opponents I have played against previously). And of course, if power is down, I can't move anything from my desktop.
But if I'm already in a tournament, playing without a HUD would be better than not playing at all. After all, once I've paid the entry fee, what would I have to lose?
Thursday, March 24, 2011
So much to learn
"The more you know, the more you know you don't know and the more you know that you don't know."
— David Byrne (The New Sins)
A year ago, I thought that I knew a lot about poker. Now, I know a lot more, but I'm amazed at how many things I've discovered that I don't know, and need to learn. It occured to me recently that someone who knows my live game, or who has tracked my online stats, would be amazed how much my game has changed--and I don't mean just that I'm a better player. I mean that bit by bit, without even realizing it, I've completely changed my approach to the game.
I'm much more of a game-theory based player. I've never studied game theory, and I doubt that I could take such a class. I don't have the mathematical coursework that would be a prerequisite. But I've put together pieces here and there, from reading those like Andy Bloch* who do understand game theory and how to apply it to poker, that game theory is more and more becoming my approach.
I started playing with a careful, very conservative approach, playing very few hands and not wanting to make any mistakes. Then I opened up a little, learning to be an exploitive player, one who takes advantage of obvious mistakes by his opponents.
'
Now, I'm much more of a game theory player. I'll give a specific example:
Conservative Clif would only play very good hands, around the top 10%, so when I played, my hand would probably best. That's fine as far as it goes, but I didn't play enough hands to accumulate enough chips to survive large-field tournaments.
Exploitive Clif, against a very loose player, might play a few more hands, probably the top 15-20%, knowing that I would still often be best against an opponent who likes to play a wide range of starting hands.
But Game Theory Clif knows that if I'm facing an opponent that plays 62% of his starting hands, it is optimal to play in the top half of that players range. That is, when facing a bet from that player, I should call or raise with anything in the top 31% of starting hands. To play fewer than exactly 31% would be missing out on long-term profit opportunities.
I'm completely revamping my game. Based on other charts in one of Andy Bloch's charts in The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition, I have been adding to the number of hands that I play when I am the first to raise an unopened pot. I have to work form a chart, because I'm tweaking my list before I have even attempted to memorize the old one.
But it's not just game theory. Just like the musician that discovers that there is more to music that learning the notes and the major scales, I'm coming across more and more things that I consider fundamental, and I'm working to learn those things.. It's overwhelming, and at the same time it's exciting. While I'm memorizing one thing, or studying one area, I come across three more things that I want to learn.
It's a lot of fun to learn all these new things, and to see my game get better and better. Trying these new things, I'm making a lot of mistakes, and I still have a good shot at increasing my bankroll by 50% this month.
Here are just a few of things that I need to learn, practice, or memorize:
The odds of being dealt an ace, and at least one other player having a ace, given the number of players (2-10) at the table.
Which hands are favored against a random hand, a top 10% hand, a top 25% hand, and a top 50% hand.
What starting hands I should play at a short table (7 players or less).
The optimal bluffing frequency in different situations.
When to call a raise, and when to reraise.
When I am getting the correct pot odds to call with a very weak hand.
How to make better use of opponent statistics displayed in the Holdem Manager heads-up display.
How to use the Holdem Manager replayer to study my hands and look for leaks.
Learn about different statistics that I might want to use in my heads-up display.
I could make the list a lot longer. There are a lot of poker books that I would like to read. I want to learn more about both hardware and software, such as how to set up and use two monitors, or the best way to share my HEM database between two computers.
There certainly is a lot to learn.
*Andy Bloch, one of the top poker pros, also coached the M.I.T. blackjack team, which was made famous by the movie "21". He holds degrees from M.I.T. and Harvard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bloch
— David Byrne (The New Sins)
A year ago, I thought that I knew a lot about poker. Now, I know a lot more, but I'm amazed at how many things I've discovered that I don't know, and need to learn. It occured to me recently that someone who knows my live game, or who has tracked my online stats, would be amazed how much my game has changed--and I don't mean just that I'm a better player. I mean that bit by bit, without even realizing it, I've completely changed my approach to the game.
I'm much more of a game-theory based player. I've never studied game theory, and I doubt that I could take such a class. I don't have the mathematical coursework that would be a prerequisite. But I've put together pieces here and there, from reading those like Andy Bloch* who do understand game theory and how to apply it to poker, that game theory is more and more becoming my approach.
I started playing with a careful, very conservative approach, playing very few hands and not wanting to make any mistakes. Then I opened up a little, learning to be an exploitive player, one who takes advantage of obvious mistakes by his opponents.
'
Now, I'm much more of a game theory player. I'll give a specific example:
Conservative Clif would only play very good hands, around the top 10%, so when I played, my hand would probably best. That's fine as far as it goes, but I didn't play enough hands to accumulate enough chips to survive large-field tournaments.
Exploitive Clif, against a very loose player, might play a few more hands, probably the top 15-20%, knowing that I would still often be best against an opponent who likes to play a wide range of starting hands.
But Game Theory Clif knows that if I'm facing an opponent that plays 62% of his starting hands, it is optimal to play in the top half of that players range. That is, when facing a bet from that player, I should call or raise with anything in the top 31% of starting hands. To play fewer than exactly 31% would be missing out on long-term profit opportunities.
I'm completely revamping my game. Based on other charts in one of Andy Bloch's charts in The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition, I have been adding to the number of hands that I play when I am the first to raise an unopened pot. I have to work form a chart, because I'm tweaking my list before I have even attempted to memorize the old one.
But it's not just game theory. Just like the musician that discovers that there is more to music that learning the notes and the major scales, I'm coming across more and more things that I consider fundamental, and I'm working to learn those things.. It's overwhelming, and at the same time it's exciting. While I'm memorizing one thing, or studying one area, I come across three more things that I want to learn.
It's a lot of fun to learn all these new things, and to see my game get better and better. Trying these new things, I'm making a lot of mistakes, and I still have a good shot at increasing my bankroll by 50% this month.
Here are just a few of things that I need to learn, practice, or memorize:
The odds of being dealt an ace, and at least one other player having a ace, given the number of players (2-10) at the table.
Which hands are favored against a random hand, a top 10% hand, a top 25% hand, and a top 50% hand.
What starting hands I should play at a short table (7 players or less).
The optimal bluffing frequency in different situations.
When to call a raise, and when to reraise.
When I am getting the correct pot odds to call with a very weak hand.
How to make better use of opponent statistics displayed in the Holdem Manager heads-up display.
How to use the Holdem Manager replayer to study my hands and look for leaks.
Learn about different statistics that I might want to use in my heads-up display.
I could make the list a lot longer. There are a lot of poker books that I would like to read. I want to learn more about both hardware and software, such as how to set up and use two monitors, or the best way to share my HEM database between two computers.
There certainly is a lot to learn.
*Andy Bloch, one of the top poker pros, also coached the M.I.T. blackjack team, which was made famous by the movie "21". He holds degrees from M.I.T. and Harvard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bloch
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Results for week 3/13-3/19
HOURS
Administrative 2.25
Study 1.50
Play 36.00
---------
39.75
I barely missed on my 40 hours, but I seem to have a hard time balancing the individual categories. Last week I got my goal of 5 hours of study, but not my 35 hours of play. This time I concentrated on getting the play hours in, and I barely studied.
Studying is critical. If I don't study, I won't get better. But just as important, if others are studying and I'm not, I'll fall behind the other serious players, or at the very least, not move up as quickly to higher buy-ins. I figured out how to use the Holdem Manager replayer, so maybe I'll do what many of the top players do, and spend some of my time going through some of my hands and looking for obvious mistakes.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll 3/13, 67.65
Ending bankroll 3/19, 85.10
+$17.45
I never doubted that I would break through and start making some money sooner or later, but being a long-term thinker (as every good poker player must be) was getting pretty old. It's a huge relief to finally be going in the right direction. Soon I'll be able to think about fun things like how fast to move up, and what to do with the money I withdraw from my account.
Administrative 2.25
Study 1.50
Play 36.00
---------
39.75
I barely missed on my 40 hours, but I seem to have a hard time balancing the individual categories. Last week I got my goal of 5 hours of study, but not my 35 hours of play. This time I concentrated on getting the play hours in, and I barely studied.
Studying is critical. If I don't study, I won't get better. But just as important, if others are studying and I'm not, I'll fall behind the other serious players, or at the very least, not move up as quickly to higher buy-ins. I figured out how to use the Holdem Manager replayer, so maybe I'll do what many of the top players do, and spend some of my time going through some of my hands and looking for obvious mistakes.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll 3/13, 67.65
Ending bankroll 3/19, 85.10
+$17.45
I never doubted that I would break through and start making some money sooner or later, but being a long-term thinker (as every good poker player must be) was getting pretty old. It's a huge relief to finally be going in the right direction. Soon I'll be able to think about fun things like how fast to move up, and what to do with the money I withdraw from my account.
Friday, March 18, 2011
A night of small cashes
Last night (ending this morning) was my longest nonstop session in quite a while. That is partly because I went fairly deep in my first try at a large-field tournament (1,000 players) in a while. But it was a small cash, because most of the money is always made at the final table.
Still, it's good discipline for me to play tournaments that force me to sit there for a long time. I started the session at 1745 yesterday, and ended at 0122 today, close to 8 hours later.
Psalty had a problem with the session. She laid on the desk the whole time, and got lots of petting (she's 20 years old and she doesn't do much but sleep and purr), but she was disappointed at my choice of snacks--chocolate (which cats can't have), pretzels, and a carrot. She loved the smell of the carrot, but after one lick she decided it wasn't as good as it smelled.
Here are the results of my night of small cashes, including a 27-player tournament from an earlier (afternoon session):
Afternoon session
$1.20 27-player tournaments, 5th place, $2.20, net result +$1.00
Evening session
$1.10 1,000-player tournament, 32nd place, $4.00, net result +$2.90
$1.40 90-player knockout tournament, 11th place, $2.20, bounty for one player knocked out, $0.25,
net result +$1.05
The good news is that I was 3 for 3 cashing, the bad news is that I got the minimum cash in the two smaller tournaments. Still, I'm pretty happy. I got some time in, and worked on parts of my game in specific situations. I went fairly deep in a large field after not playing a large tournament for a while.
Most important, it's going to be another week in the black, I'm rebuilding my bankroll, and good things are ahead. I'll continue to mix in some large-field tournaments, I'll start playing more than one table again, and in general I'll start taking the risks that are necessary to reap the financial rewards.
Still, it's good discipline for me to play tournaments that force me to sit there for a long time. I started the session at 1745 yesterday, and ended at 0122 today, close to 8 hours later.
Psalty had a problem with the session. She laid on the desk the whole time, and got lots of petting (she's 20 years old and she doesn't do much but sleep and purr), but she was disappointed at my choice of snacks--chocolate (which cats can't have), pretzels, and a carrot. She loved the smell of the carrot, but after one lick she decided it wasn't as good as it smelled.
Here are the results of my night of small cashes, including a 27-player tournament from an earlier (afternoon session):
Afternoon session
$1.20 27-player tournaments, 5th place, $2.20, net result +$1.00
Evening session
$1.10 1,000-player tournament, 32nd place, $4.00, net result +$2.90
$1.40 90-player knockout tournament, 11th place, $2.20, bounty for one player knocked out, $0.25,
net result +$1.05
The good news is that I was 3 for 3 cashing, the bad news is that I got the minimum cash in the two smaller tournaments. Still, I'm pretty happy. I got some time in, and worked on parts of my game in specific situations. I went fairly deep in a large field after not playing a large tournament for a while.
Most important, it's going to be another week in the black, I'm rebuilding my bankroll, and good things are ahead. I'll continue to mix in some large-field tournaments, I'll start playing more than one table again, and in general I'll start taking the risks that are necessary to reap the financial rewards.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Results for week 3/6-3/12
HOURS
Administrative 5.75
Study 6.00
Play 28.75
-------
40.50
I have 3 goals for my weekly hours:
1. A total of at least 40 hours.
2. At least 5 hours of study.
3. At least 35 hours playing.
I missed on the 35 hours playing, and I'm not sure how that happened. For some reason I thought I had more play hours than I did, and by the time I realized that I was in danger of falling short, we had committed to taking my youngest granddaughter out to dinner Saturday night, I was more tired than expected when I got home Saturday night, and it didn't happen.
That's two weeks in a row where I left something until the last day, and I should be upset about that. On the other hand, Saturday is supposed to be my big day. It's the day when the most players are online, when game/tournament selection is the widest, and it's the day of the week when most players have the most profit. So I should plan on Saturday being my big day.
But now there is the church issue again. It's March now, and it's not cold enought that my wife needs me to make sure that her car is cleaned off, and that the doors aren't frozen shut, before she goes to work (which is shortly after the time that my last session ends).
Except for poker, I have no reason not to go to church at least some of the time, and I'll have to figure that out. I've thought about playing all night Saturday, going to church Sunday morning, and sleeping when I get home, but the last time I tried that, I was fighting to stay awake during church. I've also thought about alternating months, for example, a poker-friendly schedule in May, and a church-friendly schedule in June.
A third option would be to change it up depending on what's going on that week. If I wanted to play one of the Sunday Majors (I've done that once) I could stay on my night schedule, sleep Sunday morning, and be rested and ready on Sunday afternoon to play a tournament that could go 12 hours or longer. If there was something special going on at church, then I could plan for that as well.
Church is important, and poker is my job. I'm not happy with any of the scheduling options that I can come up with, but I'm going to have to pick one and go with it. It's a shame that Sunday night church services don't exist any more. Then it would be simple. I could play a Sunday major whenever I wanted, and if I didn't go deep in the tournament that Sunday, then I would go to church. But that of course isn't an option.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll 3/6 53.40
Ending bankroll 3/12 14.58
--------
+$67.65
This month, so far, so good. This was a very nice week, with a 27% boost to my bankroll. I still haven't played any tournaments larger than 90-players this month, but my bankroll is getting to the point when it's not unreasonable to take an occasional $1 high-variance shot at the bigger tournaments, so I'll be mixing in a few of those soon.
Until I have at least one more good week, my main focus at the $1 level will be to steadily build up my bankroll so that I can play at the $2 level. If all goes well for the rest of the month, I'll probably be playing quite a few more 1,000+ player MTTs in March.
Administrative 5.75
Study 6.00
Play 28.75
-------
40.50
I have 3 goals for my weekly hours:
1. A total of at least 40 hours.
2. At least 5 hours of study.
3. At least 35 hours playing.
I missed on the 35 hours playing, and I'm not sure how that happened. For some reason I thought I had more play hours than I did, and by the time I realized that I was in danger of falling short, we had committed to taking my youngest granddaughter out to dinner Saturday night, I was more tired than expected when I got home Saturday night, and it didn't happen.
That's two weeks in a row where I left something until the last day, and I should be upset about that. On the other hand, Saturday is supposed to be my big day. It's the day when the most players are online, when game/tournament selection is the widest, and it's the day of the week when most players have the most profit. So I should plan on Saturday being my big day.
But now there is the church issue again. It's March now, and it's not cold enought that my wife needs me to make sure that her car is cleaned off, and that the doors aren't frozen shut, before she goes to work (which is shortly after the time that my last session ends).
Except for poker, I have no reason not to go to church at least some of the time, and I'll have to figure that out. I've thought about playing all night Saturday, going to church Sunday morning, and sleeping when I get home, but the last time I tried that, I was fighting to stay awake during church. I've also thought about alternating months, for example, a poker-friendly schedule in May, and a church-friendly schedule in June.
A third option would be to change it up depending on what's going on that week. If I wanted to play one of the Sunday Majors (I've done that once) I could stay on my night schedule, sleep Sunday morning, and be rested and ready on Sunday afternoon to play a tournament that could go 12 hours or longer. If there was something special going on at church, then I could plan for that as well.
Church is important, and poker is my job. I'm not happy with any of the scheduling options that I can come up with, but I'm going to have to pick one and go with it. It's a shame that Sunday night church services don't exist any more. Then it would be simple. I could play a Sunday major whenever I wanted, and if I didn't go deep in the tournament that Sunday, then I would go to church. But that of course isn't an option.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll 3/6 53.40
Ending bankroll 3/12 14.58
--------
+$67.65
This month, so far, so good. This was a very nice week, with a 27% boost to my bankroll. I still haven't played any tournaments larger than 90-players this month, but my bankroll is getting to the point when it's not unreasonable to take an occasional $1 high-variance shot at the bigger tournaments, so I'll be mixing in a few of those soon.
Until I have at least one more good week, my main focus at the $1 level will be to steadily build up my bankroll so that I can play at the $2 level. If all goes well for the rest of the month, I'll probably be playing quite a few more 1,000+ player MTTs in March.
Friday, March 11, 2011
My tournament analysis was right on the money
I mentioned previously that my analysis of the PokerStars 90-player tournaments was that I could be very patient and wait for good cards. Doing that is a little strange for me, since I've been working on opening up, playing more hands, having more options, and being able to "change gears" in the middle of a tournament.
However, the tournament that I just finished had me looking at a series of terrible opening hands. Even using my most liberal hand selection range, I was getting very little worth playing. So I didn't play. I folded for quite a while starting out, I think that I dumped my first 30 hands.
I kept doing that, playing a very occasional decent hand. In this tournament, where the top 12 cash, I was 39th of 41. I was 28th of 30. Still, my M was over 20, so I wasn't desperate yet. Finally, getting very low on chips, I won a nice pot and had a few chips to play with. But I wasn't moving up, I was hanging on.
After I won that pot, I looked at my statistics. I was 17th of 19. I had been playing for an hour and 38 minutes and there were 73 hands. I only went to showdown once (and won it) and I won 2 more pots without going to showdown--a total of 3 pots, less than 1 per half hour.
In most large MTTs, and even most tournaments of approximately 90 players, that would never work. I am studying a section of one of my poker books where the chapter author recommendings stealing the blinds at least once each orbit (once every 9 or 10 hands). But I was confident of my analysis of this particular tournament, and my patience was rewarded. I finished 8th and picked up a small cash (a little over 2 buy-ins). Considering what I had to work with, I'm satisfied with that.
There is a saying in poker--The answer to every question is "it depends". There is no right way to play a hand, or a tournament. Decisions depend on the stack sizes, your table image, certainly the tournament structure, and even whether the good players on are your left or your right--along with innumerable other variables.
My tournament had an unusually good structure, but in general, folding as many hands as I did is terrible strategy. Don't try this at home.
However, the tournament that I just finished had me looking at a series of terrible opening hands. Even using my most liberal hand selection range, I was getting very little worth playing. So I didn't play. I folded for quite a while starting out, I think that I dumped my first 30 hands.
I kept doing that, playing a very occasional decent hand. In this tournament, where the top 12 cash, I was 39th of 41. I was 28th of 30. Still, my M was over 20, so I wasn't desperate yet. Finally, getting very low on chips, I won a nice pot and had a few chips to play with. But I wasn't moving up, I was hanging on.
After I won that pot, I looked at my statistics. I was 17th of 19. I had been playing for an hour and 38 minutes and there were 73 hands. I only went to showdown once (and won it) and I won 2 more pots without going to showdown--a total of 3 pots, less than 1 per half hour.
In most large MTTs, and even most tournaments of approximately 90 players, that would never work. I am studying a section of one of my poker books where the chapter author recommendings stealing the blinds at least once each orbit (once every 9 or 10 hands). But I was confident of my analysis of this particular tournament, and my patience was rewarded. I finished 8th and picked up a small cash (a little over 2 buy-ins). Considering what I had to work with, I'm satisfied with that.
There is a saying in poker--The answer to every question is "it depends". There is no right way to play a hand, or a tournament. Decisions depend on the stack sizes, your table image, certainly the tournament structure, and even whether the good players on are your left or your right--along with innumerable other variables.
My tournament had an unusually good structure, but in general, folding as many hands as I did is terrible strategy. Don't try this at home.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
A breakeven day
Nothing much to talk about, yesterday I played two 90-player tournaments, missed in one and got the last cashing spot (12th) in the other one. Net result, down 60¢. I need to get more tournaments in, and I'll start playing more than one table soon. I wanted to be really safe and just get a few extra dollars to get me some wiggle room with that bankroll. Now that I've done that, I can open things up a little bit.
I've been working on being more agressive, and playing more hands, but I'm discovering that the structure of this particular tournament really rewards patience. The blinds don't go up very fast, in fact, I did some math and if I didn't play a hand I wouldn't get knocked out until between 100 and 110 minutes. These tournaments usually take around 4 hours. That's a lot of time to wait for good cards--I could wait as long as an hour for good cards and still have a pretty good chance to catch up. And that's what happened yesterday.
In my last tournament yesterday I started out by losing a lot of small pots, and didn't take one down until more than 1/2 hour into the tournament. I was a small stack most of the way, but since I don't waste chips on marginal hands, I hung on to most of what I had, finally won back-to-back medium-sized pots, and two hours in, I was suddenly 8th of of 15, and in good position to cash.
After that I didn't get much in the way of good cards, and my stack gradually dwindled. But I got in for the 12th and final spot, and when I've spent much of the tournament card-dead, I can't really complain about that.
I've been working on being more agressive, and playing more hands, but I'm discovering that the structure of this particular tournament really rewards patience. The blinds don't go up very fast, in fact, I did some math and if I didn't play a hand I wouldn't get knocked out until between 100 and 110 minutes. These tournaments usually take around 4 hours. That's a lot of time to wait for good cards--I could wait as long as an hour for good cards and still have a pretty good chance to catch up. And that's what happened yesterday.
In my last tournament yesterday I started out by losing a lot of small pots, and didn't take one down until more than 1/2 hour into the tournament. I was a small stack most of the way, but since I don't waste chips on marginal hands, I hung on to most of what I had, finally won back-to-back medium-sized pots, and two hours in, I was suddenly 8th of of 15, and in good position to cash.
After that I didn't get much in the way of good cards, and my stack gradually dwindled. But I got in for the 12th and final spot, and when I've spent much of the tournament card-dead, I can't really complain about that.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
An ethical dillema for live players
This month so far: +$10.49
It's nice to have things going in the right direction for a change.
This will be a little long, because what follows is a series a posts from the twoplustwo.com poker forums, discussing an ethical dilemma that live players sometimes face, and which I have faced. The first post is an online magazine article which is not copyrighted, and is available for the use of members of the site until 6 months after it is writen, at which point it is taken down and all rights revert to the author. Posts 2 and 3 are a conversation between myself and the author.
The Bellagio Bandit and the Bully: a Poker Player’s Dilemma
by Tim Napper
Two Plus Two Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 3
I was feeling upbeat as I walked through my favorite poker room in Macau at the start of a tournament series that held much promise for my bank roll. I was looking to hit up some soft cash games to fill in the days between preliminary events. A poker comrade had told me about a great Omaha High game going and I wandered over to the table to look at the line up. I stood back watching the game and it looked good. Nearly every pot was a family pot, and four or five guys seemed to doggedly hold on until the river. Now, I am not a big fan of Omaha since it’s one of my weaker games. But, I’m not one to say no to a situation with positive Expected Value. If I could hit a few hands and keep my head, I was going to have a good night at the tables.
After I had un-racked my chips and sat down for a few minutes, something struck me about the game. The players seemed withdrawn and were barely mumbling a word. A sense of foreboding hung over the table, a disquiet that seemed to be caused by just one of the players- a middle-aged, stocky western gentleman with a shaved head and big gold chain around his thick bull neck. He sat down one end, alternating between glowering over the game and loudly making off-color remarks about gays, Chinese people, women, you name it.
As the game continued, it got worse. He started eyeballing his opponent every time he got in a pot. He’d puff his chest out. Sometimes he’d stand up, right over his opponent. If he won or lost a big hand, he’d tell his opponent to “stay out of his pots”. If another player in the pot with him picked up chips, he’d ask them “what the [expletive] are you doing?” At one point when he lost a hand, he slammed the table and let loose with a “don’t you know who I am?” And when he wasn’t threatening other players, he’d be jabbing his finger in the face of the dealer, dropping some choice swear words.
I was stunned. I couldn’t figure out why the table or dealer was putting up with this. One or two players silently racked up and left, presumably because of his behavior. However, no one said a word. I was just about to call the floor over when a conversation between the bully and one of the other players made things a little clearer. There was talk of a court case followed by some comments about the drug trade. The clear imputation was that he had sort of association with organized crime. The bully seemed quite proud of himself and the rest of the table laughed uncomfortably as he told his story. Now, it could well have been nonsense, but everyone at the table seemed to be intimidated. Indeed, everyone seemed to know him reasonably well, and a steady stream of well known big-time local gamblers came up to the game to engage him in conversation.
So, I found this situation unacceptable, which put me in something of a dilemma. You see, I wasn’t too keen on sitting at the bully table and yet I didn’t want this guy to leave. The thing is the guy in question was also the worst player at the table by far and he also had a huge pile of chips in front of him from getting lucky a few times. From the perspective of Expected Value, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value I wanted this guy to stay in the game. I thought about the situation and figured if I made a complaint straight away one of two things would happen: (1) the guy would be asked to leave the table to cool down or (2) I could be asked to leave so as to help keep the peace (the latter seems strange but in my experience, when it is a ‘regular’ versus an ‘outsider’ in some poker rooms, the regular wins out- especially when he is a an aspiring Don). In any case, either option wasn’t very palatable. In the end, I decided on a compromise. I would beat him out of a chunk of money and then report him to the floor manager. This is exactly what I did after racking up a tidy profit, won mainly from him.
But results aside, as I walked away from the game I felt somehow unsettled. I started to think about where poker players should draw the line in terms of Expected Value. How offensive, unethical, or illegal the actions of a player will you endure just to make a profit? Anyone who has spent any time at the table has seen highly dubious behavior such as physical intimidation, verbal insults or angle-shooting. And anyone who has played for long enough has been willing to let these things go from time to time when the player doing these things is terrible and spewing chips (conversely, it may be a good strategy to object to boorish behavior from very good players, if you think it will put them off their game).
In the words of Barry Greenstein, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Greenstein in his excellent book Ace on the River,
“A successful poker player looks for any flaw in his opponents’ personalities and uses it as motivation to beat them out of their money. Fortunately, it is easy to find flaws. I like to beat up on the bad winners, bad losers, slow-rollers, deal-abusers, chauvinists, racists, egomaniacs… and loudmouths”.
Amen Barry. But sometimes I wonder if it is worth allowing the crude arithmetic of short term expected value to guide all our actions at the table.
Let me give a separate example. Late last year, the Bellagio was held up by a gunman. He simply left his motor bike running in the valet area, walked through the North entrance with his helmet still on, pointed a pistol at those standing around the nearest craps table and made off with 1.5 million in chips. Simple and effective.
But here is where the story gets interesting. The guy who committed the crime, while brazen in staging the robbery, was equally imprudent in his behavior afterwards. He decided he’d stay at the Bellagio, spend the chips he stole and contact random strangers on online poker forums, including 2+2 on whether they’d like to buy the chips. Needless to say, the guy in question, Tony Carleo, a bankrupt, drug addicted, judge’s son (what a damning troika), was captured in February. Anyway, best not to dwell on his stupidity, but rather on the response to his stupidity.
Word has it that high-stakes poker players happily sat down and took huge chunks of money from him in big poker games. He dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars over the period of just a few weeks. He was so strung out on drugs and so open about the way he’d come into enough money to play in the bigger games that pretty soon it was widely known that he was the motorbike bandit from the Bellagio. Todd Brunson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Brunson even tweeted after the bandit was arrested, saying “Tony Carleo was finally arrested for robbing the Bellagio… Was the worst kept secret in Vegas who did it.”
So here is the question: is it reasonable to play a known armed robber to beat him out of his illicit gains? What if he’d robbed a small, independently-owned business? What about if he’d shot and killed someone during the robbery? Is it ethical to try to win the money from him then? Where do we draw the line on Expected Value?
I think living your poker life focused on short-term expected value has a negative expectation in the long run. I think if you let certain things slide for too long, the really ugly side including the bullies and strung-out armed robbers; well, they make the table a pretty ugly place to be. It is this underbelly of poker that can drive people from the game. And that’s not good for value. Moreover, if you’re so mercenary that you will never take a stand on a question of principle at the table, at what point do you find your own beliefs bending to theirs? A crucial strength needed as a poker player is knowledge of oneself, and a confidence in that knowledge: of your strengths, your weaknesses, and the boundaries you form around your poker life. Enduring any offense for the sake of EV leads you to a point where you are personally diminished, and that’s not much good for your game.
Now, I’m not saying you have to get worked up over every infraction. On the contrary, like Barry says, look for the flaws in your opponents and punish them for it. For the most part, when playing scumbags, you should just shut up and drag the pot. But there’s a line here somewhere, and every good poker player needs to figure out where that line is.
If I can finish with Greenstein: “I follow a stricter set of ethical guidelines than most of my opponents, even if it costs me money in the short run. It has given me inner peace, and in the long run I have actually profited from it”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Very interesting article. I have faced situations like the one you described. Part of my job as a poker player is to stay calm in wierd or uncomfortable table situations. They are going to happen, and I have to be able to deal with it.
We've all seen the pros out of control on TV. Someone accused of cheating. Jennifer Tilly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tilly and others wearing low-cut dresses, knowing how distracting it will be to some of their opponents. Scotty Nguyen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotty_Nguyen so drunk at the table that he barely knows what's going on. Tony G http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_G shouting at an opponent who has pictures of his kids at the table, "I'll take all your money, and your children will starve!" Those things shouldn't happen, but they do, and I can't let myself tilt when it happens.
A few months ago I was playing a tournament in one of the local charity rooms. During the break I watched one of the cash games. After I watched a few hands, I realized that the dealer was inexperienced, and that things were about to take a very bad turn.
Drunk white guy (DWG) at one end of the table was insulting angry black guy (ABG) at the other end (the word "bitch", among others, was used), and I could tell that the ABG was taking it both personally and as a racist insult. I worked in a rescue mission for 12 years, and I have seen that kind of racially charged situation, with drugs or alcohol or drugs involved, more than once.
I found the tournament director and told him that there was going to be a fight. By the time the TD and I got back to the table, it had already started. The insults were flying, DWG stood up, then ABG and the other two black players at the table stood up. The TD immediately stepped in, and said that the next person to make any kind of threat or insult, or do anything physical, would be asked to leave, with police help if necessary. That took care of the problem, and everyone was on their best behavior after that.
I have always said that I would love to be at that kind of table. Not that I condone that kind of behavior, or want to be threatened. I would want a table like that because it gives me an edge--not only against a tilted, angry player, but against the table as a whole.
My edge would be that I wouldn't tilt. Like the author of the article, if you want to go on tilt, and insult or threaten me, while giving me all your money (or in my case chips, as I only play tournaments), I'll take that deal any time. In fact, I would choose such a table if I could, knowing that other players at the table would be tilted as well, even if they weren't directly involved in the verbal abuse--and playing against a table full of tilted players should give me a big edge.
However, with the bully scenario, I was uneasy about thinking that way. My problem is with letting someone drive the fish away. There are many players that will intercede, tell the bully to shut up, or call the floor to get it stopped, because they don't want to lose the fish. A bully can make it not worth the trouble for an occasional recreational player, who maybe drives to a casino once a month, or plays in a charity room only on the weekend.
So, while staying calm while being abused increases expected value, letting amateur/recreational players get chased away is -EV. Staying calm at a table of insulting morons is definitely +EV, but if it's someplace that you play regularly, doing nothing while recreational players are made uncomfortable is -EV for you, for everyone who plays there, and for the casino itself.
Regarding the robbery situation, that has happened in my city as well. We have three charity rooms, and one of them (not the one where I play) was the victim of an armed robber last year.
http://www.atpoker.com/news/armed-ro...o-microstakes/
If I knew that I was playing against one of the robbers, I would call the police as soon as I could do it without the thief knowing (not because I would be scared, but because I wouldn't want to tip him off that the police were coming).
Thanks Poker Clif, you make some good points (I am the author of the article by the way). If you are confident in your ability to stay calm, then some of the wilder tables are certainly +ev.
However - like your example of the recreational player – some of these scenarios just are not good for the game. I felt the bully certainly fit into the category of short term +ev but long term –ev for that poker room. If you have a bit of gamble in you (and in Macau, everyone has a ton of gamble) why sit down with an a-hole when you can get your fix at the baccarat table?
In my home room in Australia I’d be even less inclined to deal with any of this nonsense – one because I’m a regular and I know the floor won’t make life difficult for me, and two because I don’t want these sort of guys cutting into the profitability of the room. Again, not talking about a bit of colourful language or characters – these people are one of the reasons live poker can be enjoyable. But it’s a question of assessing where someone has gone too far (and, I should add, when the dealer or floor aren’t doing their job and responding to it).
But beyond all this – there’s the ‘inner peace’ point that Barry makes. If you get to a point where you’re sitting there in silence while someone treats the table like ***** for two hours (which is essentially what happened to me in Macau) there’s a danger you’ll experience that slow-burning tilt that eats away at your game. So yeah, I walked away with a profit – a fairly substantial one – but I’m not sure I felt good about it. There’s short term and long term ev, and in the last instance, there’s a point where you have to say f*ck value.
I guess one of the things I’ve noticed about ‘ev’ conversations is that it is almost always treated in a vacuum, as a mathematical concept - yet as we know, nothing ever exists in a vacuum at the poker table.
p.s. I will never object to low-cut dresses.
p.p.s Except maybe on Shaun Deeb
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=1&search=%22Shaun+Deeb%22&fulltext=Search&ns0=1&ns1=1&ns2=1&ns3=1&ns4=1&ns5=1&ns6=1&ns7=1&ns8=1&ns9=1&ns10=1&ns11=1&ns12=1&ns13=1&ns14=1&ns15=1&ns100=1&ns101=1&ns108=1&ns109=1
It's nice to have things going in the right direction for a change.
This will be a little long, because what follows is a series a posts from the twoplustwo.com poker forums, discussing an ethical dilemma that live players sometimes face, and which I have faced. The first post is an online magazine article which is not copyrighted, and is available for the use of members of the site until 6 months after it is writen, at which point it is taken down and all rights revert to the author. Posts 2 and 3 are a conversation between myself and the author.
The Bellagio Bandit and the Bully: a Poker Player’s Dilemma
by Tim Napper
Two Plus Two Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 3
I was feeling upbeat as I walked through my favorite poker room in Macau at the start of a tournament series that held much promise for my bank roll. I was looking to hit up some soft cash games to fill in the days between preliminary events. A poker comrade had told me about a great Omaha High game going and I wandered over to the table to look at the line up. I stood back watching the game and it looked good. Nearly every pot was a family pot, and four or five guys seemed to doggedly hold on until the river. Now, I am not a big fan of Omaha since it’s one of my weaker games. But, I’m not one to say no to a situation with positive Expected Value. If I could hit a few hands and keep my head, I was going to have a good night at the tables.
After I had un-racked my chips and sat down for a few minutes, something struck me about the game. The players seemed withdrawn and were barely mumbling a word. A sense of foreboding hung over the table, a disquiet that seemed to be caused by just one of the players- a middle-aged, stocky western gentleman with a shaved head and big gold chain around his thick bull neck. He sat down one end, alternating between glowering over the game and loudly making off-color remarks about gays, Chinese people, women, you name it.
As the game continued, it got worse. He started eyeballing his opponent every time he got in a pot. He’d puff his chest out. Sometimes he’d stand up, right over his opponent. If he won or lost a big hand, he’d tell his opponent to “stay out of his pots”. If another player in the pot with him picked up chips, he’d ask them “what the [expletive] are you doing?” At one point when he lost a hand, he slammed the table and let loose with a “don’t you know who I am?” And when he wasn’t threatening other players, he’d be jabbing his finger in the face of the dealer, dropping some choice swear words.
I was stunned. I couldn’t figure out why the table or dealer was putting up with this. One or two players silently racked up and left, presumably because of his behavior. However, no one said a word. I was just about to call the floor over when a conversation between the bully and one of the other players made things a little clearer. There was talk of a court case followed by some comments about the drug trade. The clear imputation was that he had sort of association with organized crime. The bully seemed quite proud of himself and the rest of the table laughed uncomfortably as he told his story. Now, it could well have been nonsense, but everyone at the table seemed to be intimidated. Indeed, everyone seemed to know him reasonably well, and a steady stream of well known big-time local gamblers came up to the game to engage him in conversation.
So, I found this situation unacceptable, which put me in something of a dilemma. You see, I wasn’t too keen on sitting at the bully table and yet I didn’t want this guy to leave. The thing is the guy in question was also the worst player at the table by far and he also had a huge pile of chips in front of him from getting lucky a few times. From the perspective of Expected Value, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value I wanted this guy to stay in the game. I thought about the situation and figured if I made a complaint straight away one of two things would happen: (1) the guy would be asked to leave the table to cool down or (2) I could be asked to leave so as to help keep the peace (the latter seems strange but in my experience, when it is a ‘regular’ versus an ‘outsider’ in some poker rooms, the regular wins out- especially when he is a an aspiring Don). In any case, either option wasn’t very palatable. In the end, I decided on a compromise. I would beat him out of a chunk of money and then report him to the floor manager. This is exactly what I did after racking up a tidy profit, won mainly from him.
But results aside, as I walked away from the game I felt somehow unsettled. I started to think about where poker players should draw the line in terms of Expected Value. How offensive, unethical, or illegal the actions of a player will you endure just to make a profit? Anyone who has spent any time at the table has seen highly dubious behavior such as physical intimidation, verbal insults or angle-shooting. And anyone who has played for long enough has been willing to let these things go from time to time when the player doing these things is terrible and spewing chips (conversely, it may be a good strategy to object to boorish behavior from very good players, if you think it will put them off their game).
In the words of Barry Greenstein, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Greenstein in his excellent book Ace on the River,
“A successful poker player looks for any flaw in his opponents’ personalities and uses it as motivation to beat them out of their money. Fortunately, it is easy to find flaws. I like to beat up on the bad winners, bad losers, slow-rollers, deal-abusers, chauvinists, racists, egomaniacs… and loudmouths”.
Amen Barry. But sometimes I wonder if it is worth allowing the crude arithmetic of short term expected value to guide all our actions at the table.
Let me give a separate example. Late last year, the Bellagio was held up by a gunman. He simply left his motor bike running in the valet area, walked through the North entrance with his helmet still on, pointed a pistol at those standing around the nearest craps table and made off with 1.5 million in chips. Simple and effective.
But here is where the story gets interesting. The guy who committed the crime, while brazen in staging the robbery, was equally imprudent in his behavior afterwards. He decided he’d stay at the Bellagio, spend the chips he stole and contact random strangers on online poker forums, including 2+2 on whether they’d like to buy the chips. Needless to say, the guy in question, Tony Carleo, a bankrupt, drug addicted, judge’s son (what a damning troika), was captured in February. Anyway, best not to dwell on his stupidity, but rather on the response to his stupidity.
Word has it that high-stakes poker players happily sat down and took huge chunks of money from him in big poker games. He dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars over the period of just a few weeks. He was so strung out on drugs and so open about the way he’d come into enough money to play in the bigger games that pretty soon it was widely known that he was the motorbike bandit from the Bellagio. Todd Brunson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Brunson even tweeted after the bandit was arrested, saying “Tony Carleo was finally arrested for robbing the Bellagio… Was the worst kept secret in Vegas who did it.”
So here is the question: is it reasonable to play a known armed robber to beat him out of his illicit gains? What if he’d robbed a small, independently-owned business? What about if he’d shot and killed someone during the robbery? Is it ethical to try to win the money from him then? Where do we draw the line on Expected Value?
I think living your poker life focused on short-term expected value has a negative expectation in the long run. I think if you let certain things slide for too long, the really ugly side including the bullies and strung-out armed robbers; well, they make the table a pretty ugly place to be. It is this underbelly of poker that can drive people from the game. And that’s not good for value. Moreover, if you’re so mercenary that you will never take a stand on a question of principle at the table, at what point do you find your own beliefs bending to theirs? A crucial strength needed as a poker player is knowledge of oneself, and a confidence in that knowledge: of your strengths, your weaknesses, and the boundaries you form around your poker life. Enduring any offense for the sake of EV leads you to a point where you are personally diminished, and that’s not much good for your game.
Now, I’m not saying you have to get worked up over every infraction. On the contrary, like Barry says, look for the flaws in your opponents and punish them for it. For the most part, when playing scumbags, you should just shut up and drag the pot. But there’s a line here somewhere, and every good poker player needs to figure out where that line is.
If I can finish with Greenstein: “I follow a stricter set of ethical guidelines than most of my opponents, even if it costs me money in the short run. It has given me inner peace, and in the long run I have actually profited from it”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Very interesting article. I have faced situations like the one you described. Part of my job as a poker player is to stay calm in wierd or uncomfortable table situations. They are going to happen, and I have to be able to deal with it.
We've all seen the pros out of control on TV. Someone accused of cheating. Jennifer Tilly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Tilly and others wearing low-cut dresses, knowing how distracting it will be to some of their opponents. Scotty Nguyen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotty_Nguyen so drunk at the table that he barely knows what's going on. Tony G http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_G shouting at an opponent who has pictures of his kids at the table, "I'll take all your money, and your children will starve!" Those things shouldn't happen, but they do, and I can't let myself tilt when it happens.
A few months ago I was playing a tournament in one of the local charity rooms. During the break I watched one of the cash games. After I watched a few hands, I realized that the dealer was inexperienced, and that things were about to take a very bad turn.
Drunk white guy (DWG) at one end of the table was insulting angry black guy (ABG) at the other end (the word "bitch", among others, was used), and I could tell that the ABG was taking it both personally and as a racist insult. I worked in a rescue mission for 12 years, and I have seen that kind of racially charged situation, with drugs or alcohol or drugs involved, more than once.
I found the tournament director and told him that there was going to be a fight. By the time the TD and I got back to the table, it had already started. The insults were flying, DWG stood up, then ABG and the other two black players at the table stood up. The TD immediately stepped in, and said that the next person to make any kind of threat or insult, or do anything physical, would be asked to leave, with police help if necessary. That took care of the problem, and everyone was on their best behavior after that.
I have always said that I would love to be at that kind of table. Not that I condone that kind of behavior, or want to be threatened. I would want a table like that because it gives me an edge--not only against a tilted, angry player, but against the table as a whole.
My edge would be that I wouldn't tilt. Like the author of the article, if you want to go on tilt, and insult or threaten me, while giving me all your money (or in my case chips, as I only play tournaments), I'll take that deal any time. In fact, I would choose such a table if I could, knowing that other players at the table would be tilted as well, even if they weren't directly involved in the verbal abuse--and playing against a table full of tilted players should give me a big edge.
However, with the bully scenario, I was uneasy about thinking that way. My problem is with letting someone drive the fish away. There are many players that will intercede, tell the bully to shut up, or call the floor to get it stopped, because they don't want to lose the fish. A bully can make it not worth the trouble for an occasional recreational player, who maybe drives to a casino once a month, or plays in a charity room only on the weekend.
So, while staying calm while being abused increases expected value, letting amateur/recreational players get chased away is -EV. Staying calm at a table of insulting morons is definitely +EV, but if it's someplace that you play regularly, doing nothing while recreational players are made uncomfortable is -EV for you, for everyone who plays there, and for the casino itself.
Regarding the robbery situation, that has happened in my city as well. We have three charity rooms, and one of them (not the one where I play) was the victim of an armed robber last year.
http://www.atpoker.com/news/armed-ro...o-microstakes/
If I knew that I was playing against one of the robbers, I would call the police as soon as I could do it without the thief knowing (not because I would be scared, but because I wouldn't want to tip him off that the police were coming).
Thanks Poker Clif, you make some good points (I am the author of the article by the way). If you are confident in your ability to stay calm, then some of the wilder tables are certainly +ev.
However - like your example of the recreational player – some of these scenarios just are not good for the game. I felt the bully certainly fit into the category of short term +ev but long term –ev for that poker room. If you have a bit of gamble in you (and in Macau, everyone has a ton of gamble) why sit down with an a-hole when you can get your fix at the baccarat table?
In my home room in Australia I’d be even less inclined to deal with any of this nonsense – one because I’m a regular and I know the floor won’t make life difficult for me, and two because I don’t want these sort of guys cutting into the profitability of the room. Again, not talking about a bit of colourful language or characters – these people are one of the reasons live poker can be enjoyable. But it’s a question of assessing where someone has gone too far (and, I should add, when the dealer or floor aren’t doing their job and responding to it).
But beyond all this – there’s the ‘inner peace’ point that Barry makes. If you get to a point where you’re sitting there in silence while someone treats the table like ***** for two hours (which is essentially what happened to me in Macau) there’s a danger you’ll experience that slow-burning tilt that eats away at your game. So yeah, I walked away with a profit – a fairly substantial one – but I’m not sure I felt good about it. There’s short term and long term ev, and in the last instance, there’s a point where you have to say f*ck value.
I guess one of the things I’ve noticed about ‘ev’ conversations is that it is almost always treated in a vacuum, as a mathematical concept - yet as we know, nothing ever exists in a vacuum at the poker table.
p.s. I will never object to low-cut dresses.
p.p.s Except maybe on Shaun Deeb
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=1&search=%22Shaun+Deeb%22&fulltext=Search&ns0=1&ns1=1&ns2=1&ns3=1&ns4=1&ns5=1&ns6=1&ns7=1&ns8=1&ns9=1&ns10=1&ns11=1&ns12=1&ns13=1&ns14=1&ns15=1&ns100=1&ns101=1&ns108=1&ns109=1
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Results for week of 2/27-3/5
HOURS
Administrative 2.50
Study 5.75
Playing 32.00
--------
40.25
I hit all of my goals except for getting 35 hours of playing time in. I was on my way to doing that when I suddently got very tired around 8 P.M. on Saturday. I've had jobs where I worked long hours and I got very tired, but poker is different. If I get tired and make bad decisions playing poker, it immediately costs me money. With a small bankroll, I can't take risks like that.
Fortunately, I control my own hours, so I can sleep whenever I'm tired, and play whenever I'm not.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll $50.64
Ending bankroll $53.04
--------
+$2.40
Not much of a profit, but I'm at least going in the right direction, and I'm learning something new, or getting better at at least one aspect of poker, every week. So, on to a new feature of this blog:
WHAT I LEARNED, OR WHERE I IMPROVED
My work habits are getting better. To someone who is self-employed and has ADD, this is a pretty big deal. I have two areas on which I'm working.
1. Not getting distracted between sessions. It's still way too easy for me to go off on a tangent when I'm not playing. After I eat, I'm just going to catch the news headlines on TV, then when I check my E-mail I see an interesting news story, which has a link to another news story--and then it's two hours later, and I'm still not back to playing. That happened to me once last week--I lost two hours where I really didn't do much of anything. If I want to watch TV or do something else, that's fine, but when I just blow off two hours when I intended to play poker, that shows a problem on which I need to keep working.
I'm getting more disciplined in this area, but it's happening slowly. One of the things I've done is reduce the number of TV series that I'm following. I decided not to watch White Collar or Royal Pains any more, and I really liked both of those shows. But until disciplined use of my time becomes more natural to me, I'll have to continue to impose a lot of structure to make it happen.
2. Not getting distracted during sessions. I'm doing much better in this area. I've had several sessions this month where I played with no breaks for five or more hours at a time. A couple times last week when I did get a little bored or frustrated, I stayed in the office and took a short study break on the computer, either on twoplustwo.com or on another site such as thinkingpoker.com. or another blog by one of the top professional players.
Administrative 2.50
Study 5.75
Playing 32.00
--------
40.25
I hit all of my goals except for getting 35 hours of playing time in. I was on my way to doing that when I suddently got very tired around 8 P.M. on Saturday. I've had jobs where I worked long hours and I got very tired, but poker is different. If I get tired and make bad decisions playing poker, it immediately costs me money. With a small bankroll, I can't take risks like that.
Fortunately, I control my own hours, so I can sleep whenever I'm tired, and play whenever I'm not.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll $50.64
Ending bankroll $53.04
--------
+$2.40
Not much of a profit, but I'm at least going in the right direction, and I'm learning something new, or getting better at at least one aspect of poker, every week. So, on to a new feature of this blog:
WHAT I LEARNED, OR WHERE I IMPROVED
My work habits are getting better. To someone who is self-employed and has ADD, this is a pretty big deal. I have two areas on which I'm working.
1. Not getting distracted between sessions. It's still way too easy for me to go off on a tangent when I'm not playing. After I eat, I'm just going to catch the news headlines on TV, then when I check my E-mail I see an interesting news story, which has a link to another news story--and then it's two hours later, and I'm still not back to playing. That happened to me once last week--I lost two hours where I really didn't do much of anything. If I want to watch TV or do something else, that's fine, but when I just blow off two hours when I intended to play poker, that shows a problem on which I need to keep working.
I'm getting more disciplined in this area, but it's happening slowly. One of the things I've done is reduce the number of TV series that I'm following. I decided not to watch White Collar or Royal Pains any more, and I really liked both of those shows. But until disciplined use of my time becomes more natural to me, I'll have to continue to impose a lot of structure to make it happen.
2. Not getting distracted during sessions. I'm doing much better in this area. I've had several sessions this month where I played with no breaks for five or more hours at a time. A couple times last week when I did get a little bored or frustrated, I stayed in the office and took a short study break on the computer, either on twoplustwo.com or on another site such as thinkingpoker.com. or another blog by one of the top professional players.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Results for week of 2/20-2/26
HOURS
Administrative 3.00
Study 3.75
Play 19.00
-------
25.75
This was unavoidable. A lot of very strange and time-consuming things happend, mostly technical issues with computer peripherals.
I was having problems with my router, and I couldn't seem to do anything to make it work. I never had a problem with it before, but we hadn't used it lately since we only have one computer. Now that my wife has a laptop, I dug the router out so that I could set up our home network. I messed with the router and all of the connections for quite a long time. I finally wound up calling Belkin technical support.
I got through very quickly, and you probably won't be surprised to find out that the guy sounded like he was in India. It wouldn't have been so bad except that the sound quality of the connection was quite poor. Not only was the quality poor, but it sounded like 5 other techs were talking on the phone a few inches from where my tech was sitting. It was very hard to filter everything out.
What was even stranger was that though I caught onto his accent eventually, he seemed to be having a lot of trouble understanding me. That's the first time I've had a problem being understood by someone with an East Asian accent.
That's not the worst part though. This guy was the dumbest and/or most obnoxious tech support person that I have ever dealt with. The main problem was that he refused to believe what I was telling him. Many parts of the conversation went something like this:
Tech guy--How many lights do you see on the router?
Me--Three, counting from the top, the first, second and fourth lights are lit.
Tech--If there are three lights, they must be 1, 2, and 3.
Me--That is what the instructions show that it should have, but I'm seeing lights 1, 2 and 4.
Tech, after a long pause--So how many lights do you see?
We went around like that for a while, and then there was this conversation (again, not word for word, but close enough):
Tech-Could you give me the model number?
Me--WNR2000-100NAS
Tech--Are you sure that's the right number?
Me--Yes, those letters and numbers are to the right of where it says model number.
Tech--The model number has to start with an F.
Me--I'm looking right at it and it starts with a W.
Tech--Maybe you're looking in the wrong place.
At the point I considered the possibility of a typing error in the instructions, so I looked on the box and everywhere else I could think of to find something that might show a different number. The model number didn't seem to be on the unit itself, and I couldn't find any kind of number/letter sequence that started with an F.
So we went around for a while, and then I remembered that the instructions said to have the model and serial numbers ready when I called for technical support. If I gave him the serial number, he could match it up to the correct model number, right?
Wrong!
Me--I can't find anything that starts with an F, but I have the serial number if that will help.
Tech--I don't need that. What is the model number?
This went on for more than half an hour, including a lot of long pauses where he waited for me to give him information that I didn't have, or he just didn't like. Then, on to another topic:
Tech--It must be the modem.
Me--It can't be, I use the modem every day to connect to Comcast Cable, and I used it yesterday. I don't have all of the lights on the modem, and that only happened when I connected the router.
Tech--If you don't have lights, you must not be getting power to the modem.
Me--I have one light. If it didn't have power, I wouldn't see any lights.
Tech--Please check to see if the power cord is connected to the modem.
We went around and around for a while, and the call had been going for almost an hour by then. After another of his long pauses:
Tech--I really need the model number.
Me--I ended the call.
Of course, this summary doesn't include all the times where the tech had me disconnect and reconnect things in various ways.
He had said that it might be a Comcast problem so I decided to call them. The woman that I talked to (I wish that I remembered her name) couldn't have been more professional and helpful. She got right down to business, and after about 5 minutes of pleasant conversation, she said that the modem was bad. I asked how that could be, and she said that it was old, that she had sent a signal to check it, and that I should make an appointment for someone to come over with a new modem, or I could just come in the office and swap it out for a new and better model.
I went to the local Comcast office right away, and to top off a much more pleasant support experience, I was standing in line waiting to talk to someone, and the woman at the other window said, emphatically, "No, I'm taking him!" It was an old friend from my time as clarinet section leader in a US Army Guard band. She was my second chair player, I hadn't seen her since 2006, and I had no idea that she even worked in my city.
By this time I had already bought a new router, so I hooked up the new modem, and everything worked fine, in fact much better than before. I don't know exactly what happened. It seems to be too wierd a coincidence that my router died just at the time I hooked up my old modem. I had used that modem/router combination before. My wife thinks that the modem was already weak, and addding an old router to the circuit brought the whole thing down.
That's certainly possible. I have had some lagging while playing poker. But a lot of PokerStars players have been complaining about lag slowing down their tables, so I'll never know for sure. What I know for sure is that I don't want to deal with a Belkin product again, not with support service like I experienced.
The above was a very condensed and incomplete version of all of the tech issues, but those issues, along with a little time setting up my wife's computer, kept me from playing for a couple days. Now my wife and I each have our own computer, and we can both get online whenever we want without worrying that we're keeping the other from doing things online. That's going to make things much easier for both of us.
My wife had fun entertaining herself by sending me instant messages from the laptop, even though she was sitting only 15 feet from where I was playing poker on the desktop. We're both very glad to have a computer to ourselves, and there should be nothing to keep me from putting in some serious hours this week.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll 2/20 $50.42
Ending bankrool 2/26 $49.52
--------
-$0.90
After my "Carnage in the Nanostakes" (see previous post) I managed to get back most of what I lost before all of the computer stuff happened, so I'll take that. I'll just have to keep doing that, get a respectable bankroll (and keep it), and start making money again.
Administrative 3.00
Study 3.75
Play 19.00
-------
25.75
This was unavoidable. A lot of very strange and time-consuming things happend, mostly technical issues with computer peripherals.
I was having problems with my router, and I couldn't seem to do anything to make it work. I never had a problem with it before, but we hadn't used it lately since we only have one computer. Now that my wife has a laptop, I dug the router out so that I could set up our home network. I messed with the router and all of the connections for quite a long time. I finally wound up calling Belkin technical support.
I got through very quickly, and you probably won't be surprised to find out that the guy sounded like he was in India. It wouldn't have been so bad except that the sound quality of the connection was quite poor. Not only was the quality poor, but it sounded like 5 other techs were talking on the phone a few inches from where my tech was sitting. It was very hard to filter everything out.
What was even stranger was that though I caught onto his accent eventually, he seemed to be having a lot of trouble understanding me. That's the first time I've had a problem being understood by someone with an East Asian accent.
That's not the worst part though. This guy was the dumbest and/or most obnoxious tech support person that I have ever dealt with. The main problem was that he refused to believe what I was telling him. Many parts of the conversation went something like this:
Tech guy--How many lights do you see on the router?
Me--Three, counting from the top, the first, second and fourth lights are lit.
Tech--If there are three lights, they must be 1, 2, and 3.
Me--That is what the instructions show that it should have, but I'm seeing lights 1, 2 and 4.
Tech, after a long pause--So how many lights do you see?
We went around like that for a while, and then there was this conversation (again, not word for word, but close enough):
Tech-Could you give me the model number?
Me--WNR2000-100NAS
Tech--Are you sure that's the right number?
Me--Yes, those letters and numbers are to the right of where it says model number.
Tech--The model number has to start with an F.
Me--I'm looking right at it and it starts with a W.
Tech--Maybe you're looking in the wrong place.
At the point I considered the possibility of a typing error in the instructions, so I looked on the box and everywhere else I could think of to find something that might show a different number. The model number didn't seem to be on the unit itself, and I couldn't find any kind of number/letter sequence that started with an F.
So we went around for a while, and then I remembered that the instructions said to have the model and serial numbers ready when I called for technical support. If I gave him the serial number, he could match it up to the correct model number, right?
Wrong!
Me--I can't find anything that starts with an F, but I have the serial number if that will help.
Tech--I don't need that. What is the model number?
This went on for more than half an hour, including a lot of long pauses where he waited for me to give him information that I didn't have, or he just didn't like. Then, on to another topic:
Tech--It must be the modem.
Me--It can't be, I use the modem every day to connect to Comcast Cable, and I used it yesterday. I don't have all of the lights on the modem, and that only happened when I connected the router.
Tech--If you don't have lights, you must not be getting power to the modem.
Me--I have one light. If it didn't have power, I wouldn't see any lights.
Tech--Please check to see if the power cord is connected to the modem.
We went around and around for a while, and the call had been going for almost an hour by then. After another of his long pauses:
Tech--I really need the model number.
Me--I ended the call.
Of course, this summary doesn't include all the times where the tech had me disconnect and reconnect things in various ways.
He had said that it might be a Comcast problem so I decided to call them. The woman that I talked to (I wish that I remembered her name) couldn't have been more professional and helpful. She got right down to business, and after about 5 minutes of pleasant conversation, she said that the modem was bad. I asked how that could be, and she said that it was old, that she had sent a signal to check it, and that I should make an appointment for someone to come over with a new modem, or I could just come in the office and swap it out for a new and better model.
I went to the local Comcast office right away, and to top off a much more pleasant support experience, I was standing in line waiting to talk to someone, and the woman at the other window said, emphatically, "No, I'm taking him!" It was an old friend from my time as clarinet section leader in a US Army Guard band. She was my second chair player, I hadn't seen her since 2006, and I had no idea that she even worked in my city.
By this time I had already bought a new router, so I hooked up the new modem, and everything worked fine, in fact much better than before. I don't know exactly what happened. It seems to be too wierd a coincidence that my router died just at the time I hooked up my old modem. I had used that modem/router combination before. My wife thinks that the modem was already weak, and addding an old router to the circuit brought the whole thing down.
That's certainly possible. I have had some lagging while playing poker. But a lot of PokerStars players have been complaining about lag slowing down their tables, so I'll never know for sure. What I know for sure is that I don't want to deal with a Belkin product again, not with support service like I experienced.
The above was a very condensed and incomplete version of all of the tech issues, but those issues, along with a little time setting up my wife's computer, kept me from playing for a couple days. Now my wife and I each have our own computer, and we can both get online whenever we want without worrying that we're keeping the other from doing things online. That's going to make things much easier for both of us.
My wife had fun entertaining herself by sending me instant messages from the laptop, even though she was sitting only 15 feet from where I was playing poker on the desktop. We're both very glad to have a computer to ourselves, and there should be nothing to keep me from putting in some serious hours this week.
PROFIT AND LOSS
Starting bankroll 2/20 $50.42
Ending bankrool 2/26 $49.52
--------
-$0.90
After my "Carnage in the Nanostakes" (see previous post) I managed to get back most of what I lost before all of the computer stuff happened, so I'll take that. I'll just have to keep doing that, get a respectable bankroll (and keep it), and start making money again.
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