Poker Moth

As mentioned earlier, there’s not been much poker played round these parts of late. I had intended to get back to the virtual felt today, but a truly spectacular hangover put paid to that plan. So, in lieu of anything else to write about, it’s time for another Pokertube review. It’s coming. Any second now. Wait for it…

Christ alive, my head hurts.

SO. Whereas the last PT Review was about a gimmicky lifestyle show, this is a proper, competitive offering, which comes in two parts. There’s the Aussie Millions main event, of course, but that’s no longer considered enough in the modern poker broadcasting era, so we also get two episodes devoted to a HSP-aping side game. I’m fairly sure that this will become standard practice in poker broadcasting soon enough; tournaments are messy things where you can end up with a final table full of unknowns, so it behooves the networks to set up a side game where they can fill the seats with big names to get some guaranteed sleb-poker action.

As it happens, they needn’t have bothered in this instance, because the final table of the main event is considerably more interesting than the side game. Not only do we get a decent smattering of name players at the FT, but the action is more entertaining; the cash game is rather quiet and cagey, and, without spoilering too much, the main focus is the obligatory amateur, a Japanese businessman who seems to unsettle the assembled star names, leading to a tense encounter. It’s not terrible viewing, but there’s none of that HSP magic here.

Still, that’s just two episodes of moderately tedious poker; the eight episodes covering the Main Event are much, much more interesting. I won’t go into details, but the producers have done a good job of filling those eight shows with watchable poker.

There’s also some decent commentary; Barry Tompkins (TV Guy) and Michael Konik (Cardplaying Guy) do the honours, and they do a better job than most of their contemporaries. That said, that’s not so hard: I could train a Cabbage Patch Doll to be a better poker commentator than most. But the worst criticisms I can make of Bazza and Mike are fairly pathetic; Tompkins can’t say “Aussie” properly, and Konik is obsessed with the word “prohibitive”. The former is grating, the latter plain weird, but neither’s causing too much trouble.

The main irritation comes from the ESPN-style presentation (in fact, this may well be an ESPN production; if it’s not, the producers have gone out of their way to ape the WSOP broadcast format). You know the form – you see two hands played, then it’s away to a celebrity montage, where Phil, Mike, Dan and co line up to tell us all about the longest session of poker they’ve played, or to share their thoughts on a lesser known player, or (the very worst part) take part in a regular feature where they get to guess the meaning of obscure Australian dialect phrases. Then, it’s back to the featured table for two more hands of boring old poker.

Don’t get me wrong – I like these guys. They’re entertaining people. But do I really need to know whether Gavin Smith can guess the meaning of the word cackleberry? Turns out the answer’s no. Sorry, that’s wrong. The answer’s FUCK NO.

But buried in between all of that guff is a superb poker tournament; if you’ve exhausted all the High Stakes Poker excellence that Pokertube has to offer, this is a pretty good substitute.

Aussie Millions 2007
Aussie Millions Cash Game

I’ve been taking some time off, on the flimsy pretext that there’s some kind of Christian festival going on, and I have convinced myself that I need to concentrate on scarfing down lots of food and booze for a week or so. Of course what I really need to be doing is 40 hours of limit grinding a week, but that doesn’t appeal so much.

Anyway, the party’s nearly over; one final beanfeast this evening, and then it’s back to work, and presumably back to regular posts on here. Hooray!

Hey hey – it’s a new poker show!
Pokertube: Ace In The House.

Ever seen the Television Executives sketches from The Armando Iannucci Show? (Alas, no Youtube clip). This is one of those poker shows. It’s got ordinary people in it. It’s got a concept. We’re so good at telly! We’re so good at telly!

Oh, yeah. The concept. Take one ordinary home game, and add a big name pro. (Mike Matusow gets bussed in for the first game in the series, unsurprisingly – no doubt Negreanu and Hellmuth will follow). The big name pro and the little people play an STT in someone’s living room, with the winner getting $10,000.

And, you know, it’s not a terrible format in theory, but the execution’s ropey. It’s a forty-ish minute show, and a hefty chunk of that is given over to the preamble; first we meet the ordinaries, giving their little biogs to camera – here’s the guy who thinks he’s a shark, here’s his girlfriend. Then we get to see Matusow being shown the same clips, just so we can get his opinion on which nobody he’ll bust first. The upshot of all this is that the action is more heavily edited than usual; most of the ordinaries get to feature in one hand, and one hand only.

When the cards finally get dealt, the other problem with the show announces itself; it’s another overly chatty commentator who suffers from Gabe Kaplan Syndrome (i.e. he talks too much, mainly to tell you what the players at the table are saying, which wouldn’t be necessary if he stopped talking over them). Mr. Commentator has an educational remit, which means he devotes plenty of time to explaining how brilliant the pro’s plays are, and how poor the amateurs are. Not so different from most poker shows, then, but irritating all the same.

Despite that, the format has potential; with the right pro (Matusow, for instance), it’s still perfectly watchable. The big problem with episode one is the ordinaries; for some reason, Mike gets to play against an Argos version of the cast of Friends; irritating media types with stupid hats and too many teeth. Maybe I’m just prejudiced against toothy attractive young people; YMMV, but I’d imagine most viewers will be rooting for the lovable pro.

SO, IN SUMMARY, THEN: It could be worse, it may well get better, but there’s nothing special going on here. Just another average poker show, I’m afraid.

The Poker Moth: watching everything on Pokertube so you don’t have to.

Well, guess who’s bonuswhoring? With Christmas approaching and the coffers not looking too healthy, I’ve been forced to knuckle down and grind some limit ring Hold’em. Now, I know many people are down on limit, and it’s not necessarily my idea of a cracking time either, but if the circumstances are right, it can be both lucrative and very, very funny. Back in the good old Betfair-on-Crypto days, it was my bread and butter, and I loved it.

My current site isn’t quite as loose as Oldcrypto, but it’s close enough to make the bonus chase worthwhile, and that’s led to me multitabling again. The last few days have been spent acclimatizing to the no fold’em game, and I’m now somewhere approaching my old form (I used to tick along at 8BBs/100 on Crypto, which is, or rather, was, pretty fearsome). However, being impatient, I’m doing silly things. Things like playing nine 25c/50c tables simultaneously.

I’ve just spent ninety minutes doing that, and my head is reeling. Not so much from trying to keep pace with the action, more with trying to deal with taking a bad beat once every two minutes. The problem with MAXIMUM FISH EXPOSURE is that you’re also getting MAXIMUM BAD BEAT EXPOSURE, and it can do funny things to your mind. Even when you’re winning; I finished the session with a small profit, but still felt like I’d been running a booth at a mugger’s convention.

What’s worse, playing that many tables at once means distinctly suboptimal play; while it’s not hard to turn a profit against eighty-one appalling players, the fact that you’re having to make a decision every five seconds means you’re going to end up making bad decisions every minute or so, and that means money left on the table.

The upside? Once you’ve spent an hour and a half ninetabling 25c/50c, fourtabling 50c/$1 seems like a relaxing way to spend your evening.

Phwooooar. Eh lads? Eh? Phwwwwoar.

Ever read Alan N Schoonmaker’s Psychology Of Poker? No? You should, it’s excellent. Schoonmaker’s shtick is to outline four different types of poker player, (Loose Aggressive, Loose Passive, Tight Passive and Tight Aggressive), explain why they play the way they do, and then explain how the reader can change their playing style to the One True Style, the tight aggressive ideal, assuming they’re not TAG already. It’s a fascinating read, and particularly good for players who are just starting out.

Of course, there’s more to poker psychology than betting patterns. You can classify poker players into various categories, but the problem is that making glib generalisations about your opponents based on certain aspects of their behaviour can be a risky business. However, there’s one group of players who can be psychoanalysed and pigeonholed relatively safely, and that’s the table expert. I’ve been studying these loudmouthed feckers for some considerable time now, and I’ve come to some solid conclusions, which I’m very generously going to share with you, the non-existent readers of my blog.

First up – a quick definition. Table experts are the people who volunteer opinions on how others have played their hands. They’ll usually be criticising the “worst” player at the table. Play online, at any level, for more than an hour or two and you’re all but guaranteed to run into at least one, if not several. And when you encounter one, you can draw some immediate conclusions about them.

1. They lose money.

2. They’ve read a book. Sometimes more than one.

3. They’ll play predictable ABC poker before the flop. They’re completely hopeless postflop.

4. They’re very, very prone to tilt.

You see, the reason why the table expert behaves the way he (female table experts are rare) does is because they believe they should be winning money. They’ve read a book, see? They know what hands you’re allowed to play, and what hands are STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, they don’t win money. They lose it. And it makes them angry and bitter.

Most normal poker players realise that when someone’s playing badly, the last thing you should do is announce, as loudly as possible, “LOOK! LOOK! THAT PERSON IS PLAYING BADLY!”. This is because most normal poker players would rather their opponents played badly, as that improves the chances that you’ll win their money. Seems obvious, yes?

However, table experts have other priorities. They’ve read a book, they’ve memorised a chart of starting hand requirements, and yet they’re still losing money. To the table expert, this is inexplicable; they cannot for the life of them understand why they’re not living on a beach in Costa Rica surrounded by coke and hookers. They will quickly arrive at one or both of the following conclusions.

1. Online poker is rigged.

2. They’re losing because there are too many players who aren’t playing properly.

And bearing the above in mind, they quickly realise that it’s not their fault that they’re losing, and before long their dreams of a Costa Rican cokewhore lifestyle are replaced by an entirely different objective; to demonstrate how much they know about the game by telling everyone else how badly they’re playing, which somehow makes the table expert feel better about the dollars these “bad” players are taking from him.

*pauses, reads previous paragraphs back*

Hmm, hardly an objective psychological appraisal, is it? But you get the gist, and while the above may read like a horribly subjective rant (alright, IS a horribly subjective rant), it’s backed up by research. For several months, I’ve looked up every table expert I’ve come across on OPR. I haven’t been keeping a tally (I’ve got enough stuff open on my underpowered computer when I’m playing without adding a bloody spreadsheet to the mix), but I’d estimate that a bare minimum of 95% of the experts I OPR’d were losers. Most of them heavy losers.

And, of course, I talk to them. This always starts off with me politely requesting that they stop playing Teacher, and usually descends into an argument. (Table experts don’t take well to people challenging their authority, and while I happily admit to being an overbearing arrogant sod, I’m always careful to be ever-so-polite when I’m talking to these fools. It’s very rare that I’ll get a polite response, though). And whenever I can get the table expert to rise above gratuitous cackhanded insults, they almost always reveal themselves to be bitter losers who genuinely believe that their losses are someone else’s fault.

How can you take advantage of this? Well, as mentioned above, table experts are almost always tight preflop, and generally incapable of laying down a strong hand postflop. Implied odds for draws go through the roof against table experts, who seem to view flush chasing as being morally equivalent to ritualized Satanic child abuse, and love to call a flushed board so they can get that satisfying rush of indignation, mingled with the bonus high of knowing they were right all along; if it weren’t for the fish, they’d be winners, but it’s all rigged anyway, so who cares?!

In short, these people are poker’s answer to Daily Mail readers; they want to be outraged, and they’re happy to pay money for the privilege. Don’t disappoint them!

Oh, man. I just logged into Pokertube to catch the latest episode of HSP, and the featured video on the front page was a tribute to Chip Reese. And my first thought was “well, Chip’s the kind of guy you’d create a tribute for even if he hadn’t died…”, but, sadly, not this time.

I don’t go in for the distance-quotes-mourning of celebrities in general; it’s one of those weird internet phenomena that I just don’t get. Someone famous dies, then someone on an internet forum posts a RIP thread, and everybody else forms an orderly line to pay their respects and snarl at anyone who questions whether celebrity X deserved that sort of meaningless internet tribute. Sadly, (as mentioned above), Chip Reese was a player who deserved tribute, alive or dead, and I’m genuinely saddened to hear of his death. We need more Chip Reeses in the world, not less.

R.I.P, Chip.

The time has come for me to indulge in a potentially disastrous pastime; prolonged examination of my game, in the hope of identifying the factors that cause me to leave money on the table. Sounds like a good thing, right? And yet the process is fraught with danger, because poker is a very deceptive game; it is remarkably easy to delude yourself into thinking that you’re doing the right thing, when in fact you’re doing the exact opposite. A poker newbie will constantly delude him or herself into thinking that they’re playing reasonably well. All I need to do to confirm this is look back at my early posts on poker fora. There I am, utterly clueless, dispensing terrible advice with all the confidence of an established poker author who’s half way through writing the third volume of his successful strategy series. It’s quite embarrassing. Most of those posts are from the second and most pronounced stage of Poker Strategy Delusion, which I term the “donkey’s learned to read” stage. What happens is that the nascent poker genius, fresh from winning a couple of dollars at the lowest available limits, decides to invest his profits in a strategy book. What follows is always messy, because proto-Brunsons don’t have the experience to comprehend strategy advice properly, much less the sensitivity to table conditions required to apply that advice according to context, and consequently they almost always end up playing far worse poker than before they’d sought the advice of the stars. In my case, it was Phil Hellmuth’s “Play Poker Like The Pros”, a book which I borrowed from a friend and only read about half of, which taught me invaluable lessons like “always push with a pair of sevens in the hole”. My bankroll was lucky to survive advice like that.

(There’s a tangent open to me here about how ingesting poker strategy before you’re able to comprehend it can lead to the creation of the worst kind of human: the Table Expert. But I think I’ll save that for another post).

However, having a load of experience doesn’t magically erase this problem. In some ways, it exacerbates it. Sure, once you’ve grasped certain fundamentals of poker, you’re far better equipped to understand strategic considerations and apply them to your game, but you’re always operating in what amounts to a fact-vacuum, and all that increased confidence that experience and skill generates can lead you to experienced, skillful delusions, which are much worse, as they’re backed up by ill-founded confidence. Ultimately, you can pore over hand histories and your Poker Tracker database for hours, agonising over how variations in your play have affected your profits, and you’re still in danger of coming to the wrong conclusions, because all you can see are trends and tendencies. The absence of hard facts, coupled with relative inexperience that feels like experience (you’ve only been playing poker more-or-less constantly for three years? Lol, noob) means you can never be sure you’re living right.

Or maybe I’m just paranoid. Or blasé. Or timid. Or overconfident. Or I gamble too much. Or too little. These are all viable explanations. All I have are suspicions, which I’ll outline below.

THINGS THAT ARE PROBABLY WRONG WITH MY TOURNAMENT GAME (or; a handy reference sheet for opponents).

1. I resteal too much.

This is probably the most solid and dependable criticism I can make of myself. I do love a resteal (translation: reraising an opponent who you suspect is trying to steal your big blind), and it’s been my undoing more often than I care to count. The big problem here is that I get paranoid about my table image; I convince myself that whenever a player raises me from a steal position, it’s because my table image is weak and tight, and not, for instance, because he’s holding a pair of jacks. Stands are made, chips are lost, and far too often, felt is exposed.

I know how to improve this. (Or at least, I think I do; see above). Restealing is a high-risk, costly approach to blind defence, and what’s worse, a successful resteal will improve your table image, but it doesn’t do a great deal for your stack unless you get called and suck out. It’s still an important part of the blind defence repertoire, but I definitely need to call/probe bet far more often than I resteal. In fact, I should only be restealing when the conditions are near-perfect.

On a semi-related note…

2. My gearbox is out of whack, part one – the low-M push.

Ah, M theory. For the uninitiated, M theory dictates how fast you should play in a tournament; your M is the ratio of your chip stack to the size of the blinds/antes, and the lower it is, the more aggressive you should play. In general.

This becomes particularly crucial when your chips are dwindling. Every hand becomes a life or death decision in which you have to balance the strength of your hand, the action in front of you, your position and your M, and then decide if this is the hand where you intend to make your final stand. There are two prevailing theories (that I’m aware of) here; the Harrington approach, which dictates that when your M drops much below 5, you should be looking for a favourable situation to get your chips in the middle ASAP, and the Sklansky method, which suggests that each hand/situation’s strength should be balanced against the probability that you’ll get a better hand/situation on the next deal.

I have always favoured the Harrington approach, because I tell myself that I don’t like playing shortstacked. This probably isn’t true; at various stages in my career I’ve experimented with a more Sklanskian (?) approach, and done rather well with it. It just doesn’t sit well with me; for some reason that I genuinely don’t understand, I’m predisposed towards blind-stealing all-ins from late position with weak hands. Or maybe the mathematical arguments for this style of play make more sense to me.

The danger with the Harrington approach is that it’s quite easy to overdo it; I’ll often allow the situational considerations to outweigh the weakness of my cards, and find myself pushing with a really weak holding because (for instance) the big blind’s a nit and the players inbetween are as short as I am, only to get called twice by genuine hands. That’s never fun.

The other problem is that it’s incredibly hard to quantify just how damaging this type of behaviour is. Not only does it feel much worse when you get it wrong, cementing the impression that it’s a bad idea, but it’s impossible to know whether things would have been better if you’d waited for Sklansky’s promised better hand. It’s possible, but it’s by no means guaranteed.

Conclusion? *shrug*

3. My gearbox is out of whack, part two – avoiding the waiting game.

There’s something else that bugs me about my game, and that’s my inability to do the strategically-recommended thing when I’m a small – but not perilously small – stack.

Harrington outlines several M “zones”. The “dead zone” is when you have an M of 1 or less, where you’re pretty-much obligated to push your chips in immediately. Then there’s the “red zone” (2m-5m), which is discussed above. Unhappily, I also think I need to make some changes to my play in the orange zone (5-10m) and yellow zone (10-20m). The good news is that I think I’m pretty decent in the green zone (20m+).

Anyway, 5-20m. Theory states that when you have an M above 20, you can play as many hands as you feel like. As Harrington says, all styles are open to you. However, when your M drops below 20, your theoretically correct strategic options become limited. Certain hands become unplayable as your stack dwindles, which I’m fine with. The problem is that as your stack dwindles, you’re supposed to become more aggressive in an attempt to get back into the green zone. Now, that’s fine in principle, but it’s bloody hard to do in practice. I don’t like getting pot-committed preflop with AJ, position or not. I’d rather not risk my tournament by playing a big pot with KQs. I would rather watch the blinds eat my stack away while I wait for a hand that I fancy to be ahead when it gets called, up until the point where my stack gets to the size where I completely forget about the cards and start pushing with air.

I like to flatter myself that I’m technically a pretty solid tournament player, but that’s a huge problem with my game, right there. I think. As ever, it’s hard to quantify just how huge a problem it is.

4. I talk too much.

I talk too much in general, obviously, but this specifically refers to chat box arguments. Now, I’m not proud of this, but I frequently find myself indulging in protracted rows in the chat box, and they tend to have a seriously debilitating affect on my results.

Let me clarify things a little by pointing out that I am NOT a table expert. In fact, the thing which usually provokes me into chat-battle is an attempt to humiliate table experts to deflect them away from their attempts to scare off the dead money. I’ll have more to say on the subject of table experts in a later post, but suffice to say that they wind me up, and I tend to put the boot into them whenever I encounter them. Again: it’s not clever, and I’m not proud. The only other time I’ll get involved is if someone bluffs at a dry side pot, which is when I do turn table expert. It’s the only area I know of where it’s safe to educate fish, because dry side pot bluffs have no positive side effects (that I can see, anyway), and consequently there’s no harm in trying to deter other players from doing it. Well, apart from one thing.

The problem here isn’t that I’m educating fish; it’s that I get distracted from the actual poker. I’m too good at playing the chat box game, (certainly a lot better than most of my opponents, which admittedly isn’t hard) and consequently I enjoy it far too much. The upshot is that while I’m busy typing out cutting, witty banter, I’m ignoring the action and missing out on opportunities to steal pots, and this approach is full of lose. And again, positive reinforcement is a danger; it’s easy to remember all the times I’ve successfully needled some poor bastard into calling my all-in with ace high, but it’s much harder to recall the occasions when I’ve allowed myself to be blinded out because I wasn’t paying proper attention to the action.

So, I probably need to do less of that.

5. Bankroll management.

I used to think I was pretty hot on this subject, but I’ve had to reconsider this after the past few months of screwing things up. I’ve traditionally been ultra-conservative with my bankroll, and in the past that’s never done me any harm, but it’s become difficult to maintain that attitude thanks to a couple of elementary mistakes I made when embarking on my latest stint as a full-time pro, which led to my bankroll being diminished, and me not really comfortable with moving up the limits in order to replenish it. Not because I’m scared of playing higher, but because I’m at my happiest when I’m playing well below my skill level. I’m not a big fan of placing unnecessary pressure on myself, to put it mildly.

Quite how to adjust my bankroll management to compensate for the problems I’ve created for myself.. not sure, yet. One to ponder over.

RIGHT, THAT’S ENOUGH CATHARSIS. There’s probably more I could go into, but I’ve been at this post for two hours, and throughout that period I’ve been paying insufficient attention to the $10+1 Deep Stack on Stars…

*edit* Four and a half hours of no cards, finished on the bubble. Still, felt good about it.

I’ve been going through a fairly vicious downswing recently. Well, I say “fairly vicious”; more accurate to say “the worst run I’ve ever had”. And by “recently”, I mean “over the last three months”. It’s been brutal. Until this autumn, I’d never had a losing month in my three years of semi-pro/pro poker play, but September and October both ended with red figures in the profit/loss column, and November saw me turn things around with a small profit, of the sort that doesn’t put food on the table, never mind rent money in my landlord’s bank account.

It’s been NO FUN. But things may be changing. I won my biggest (in terms of entrants) tournament ever yesterday, besting 2000 runners to win a couple of hundred dollars in a new depositors freeroll on an iPoker site. This was particularly satisfying as I got my chips in as a massive dog on three seperate ocassions, (KQs v AQs, then AKs v AA v QQ, and another suckout that I can’t even remember), and won them all. While there’s some pleasure to be gained from losing in a tournament where you’ve constantly outplayed your opponents and been knocked out by a bad beat (I may be poor, but at least I’m skilled), it doesn’t really compare to a win where you’ve fished your way through numerous bad calls and walked away with the money.

It’s not a lot of money – Christmas is still officially cancelled, until further notice – but it’s done wonders for my confidence. The best bit was when I realised that iPoker tournaments don’t level up the blinds indefinitely; with four million chips in play, the final blind level is 20k/40k, which meant the latter half of the final table was a genuine poker test instead of a lottery, and one I won pretty easily.

Has the new blog inspired me? Does it possess magical properties that will enable me to win my share of suckouts for a change? Only time will tell! (No).

I’ve been playing small stakes pot limit Omaha hi/lo, which absolutely terrifies me. Why? Because of hands like this…

*edit* As this hand took place on iPoker, home of the wacky uncopyable hand histories, it’ll have to be prose. Plus I still haven’t sorted out a style sheet for HHs…

Four players in the hand. I have Ac 2h 5h Js in the small blind, two players limp in, I complete, and the BB checks.

Flop is 8d 6d 4h. I check, the BB bets out less than half the pot, gets three callers. Turn is the 7c, I check, BB bets the pot, the other two guys call, and I reluctantly call behind. River is the 7d, and by the time it gets to me, everybody’s chips are in the middle, and did I mention that I’m basically completely clueless at this game?

I look at my nut low, look at the board, and think how annoying it will be to get quartered, or worse. I then look at the money in the pot; there’s already four buy-ins in there, and that’s enough reason for me to click the call button. It was probably the only reason, in fact.

So! The high half of the pot went to the big blind, who had the straight flush (T9 diamonds). The first limper won nothing with his quad sevens. I split the low half with the other limper, who had the A2 of diamonds, and I ended up making a small loss on the hand.

I have no idea if the call was right or not. Maybe, in that spot, with a paired, flushed, straighty board, there was a good chance that I was up against three high hands (straight flush, quads, and the “nut” flush, even) and some non-nut lows, in which case I’d be scooping the low half of this mammoth pot. That has to be weighed against the chance that I’m either up against one other nut low (where I lose a couple of BBs), or more than one nut low, (where I lose between a third and half of my buy-in). I think the call comes out ahead, there. I think.