Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Poker in the Caribbean

It was not a surprise to discover that the poker room, while an integral part of the casino, was completely vacant for most of the day. Although the Hollywood Casino, right on the campus of the Simpson Bay Resort on Dutch Sint Maarten, opened its doors each day at 1pm (more or less), there wasn't a soul to be found anywhere near the four baize-topped tables until after the dinner hour had passed. Sometime after sundown, a sign-up list appeared on a clipboard atop one of those tables, along with a pen, inviting would-be rounders to indicate their interest by adding their name. The pre-printed data on the form promised that the $2/$5 game would begin “around 9pm”, and only required a minimum buy-in of $100, with no maximum. I added my name next to the Seat Two line, and since Seat One was already claimed by a punter named “Steve”, I signed as “Devo” – my college nickname – to  identify myself more uniquely.

At precisely 2100 hours I dutifully returned to the site of my upcoming triumph … to discover that it was still vacant. (“Island Time” is the term I came up with to describe the punctuality of the St. Maarten residents.) A subsequent visit fifteen minutes later was only slightly more fruitful; a terminally bored dealer had materialized, sitting behind three full chip racks (one each for $1, $5, and $25 chips). Arrayed around the remaining circumference of the table were three would-be players, looking equally bored. I joined them to become the fourth.

The next fifteen minutes I spent amiably chatting with the lady in Seat Five (Angela from Chicago, so it emerged). A fifth player then grabbed a seat, and as this was apparently the magic number, the dealer and her floor manager began buying our American currency, exchanging it for the equivalent in clay-composite chips, and we were shortly underway. Most folks, including me, considered $300 to be sufficient ammunition for the battles to come.

As I anticipated, actually getting the cards into the air served as the siren call for the rest of the players to join us. At 51, I was clearly one of the youngest at the table; it soon became equally clear that I was the best.

The aforementioned “Steve”, at Seat One, turned out to be a rather chunky guy, laden down with gold jewelry to a point just this side of tacky. He was accompanied by a varied posse of attendants who came and went throughout the evening. He was not left alone for a single moment, conversing with one companion after another throughout his entire time at the table occasionally slipping into some Slavic language (Greek? Croatian?). I pegged him as a big drug dealer; perhaps mafia. Contrary to the rest of us, he bought in $1000 at a time, proceeding to give it all away on a consistent basis.

Steve quite literally played every hand dealt to him. Regardless of whether a pot had been raised (or even re-raised) ahead of him pre-flop, or if he was the tenth limper, he had to see every flop. It goes without saying that this is what led to his disastrous results (of which he seemed quite oblivious). But what I found annoying about his style was the pace of his play. Each action on every street required excruciating deliberation. He’d look at his cards; cut them several times; look at them once more (his thumb flipping their corners with a satisfying “fwap”); cap them with a chip; count the rest of his chipstack; cut out calling chips; cut out raising chips; study the board cards carefully; reassemble his chipstack and look at his cards again …

But worse than that; the rest of the table, clearly looked at Steve as some sort of poker model to be imitated (and he certainly looked, if not played, the role). Consequently, every single player (save me) went through the process of carefully contemplating every move. A pre-flop fold holding 7-2 required a Solomonic degree of consideration prior to acting. I marveled that these people were even capable of selecting “paper or plastic” at the grocery store check-out.

The other troubling aspect of the game was the overwhelming rake. Winning a hand in the States will set you back 5% of the pot, capped at a maximum of somewhere around $3 to $5 depending on the room (not counting jackpot drop or dealer toke). However, I was never able to get a handle on the rake in this game. Dozens of chips were flying into the pot with each hand, fueled largely by Steve and his $1000-at-a-time re-buys. And each time the dealer dropped so many chips down into the rake box that, near as I could tell, it was amounting to 10% of each pot with no cap.

Generally speaking, a game of this sort simply cannot be beat. The only exceptions are when the players are particularly bad, or the game is particularly loose. And both of these elements were present in this game. When I finally calculated my overall win rate during the entire week of play, it amounted to around $100/hour, a phenomenal rate for a $2/$5 game. How phenomenal? Well, let me put it this way: It’s something I've never achieved before; and I predict that, no matter how long I live, I’ll never see it again.

Most of these earnings actually came at the Aruban poker room at the Excelsior Casino, located at the Holiday Inn resort. The rake there, I discovered by careful enquiry, was an only slightly more reasonable 5% with a $10 cap and $2 jackpot drop.

At this room they had a $4/$8 limit game with an interesting rule variation. In the States, a $4/$8 game would have blinds of $2 and $4, with pre-flop and flop betting increments of $4, and turn/river bets in increments of $8. Here, though, you could choose to bet either $4 on the flop or go straight to $8 a street early.  The math related to this flop bet modification, combined with the aggressive rake, called for an overly tight game.

I experimented with this feature somewhat, although when I discovered that I was consistently betting low with draws and high with made hands, I shifted gears to betting the max on the flop. I had no desire to make myself so easily readable; although at this table I could have played each hand face up and still come away winner.

I pretty much kept my limit play to a minimum, playing only until a seat at the red-chip game opened up. There was so much more money to be made there. Even so, to give an example, I played a 30-minute session at the limit game, buying in for $100 and cashing out for $265.


When I toted up the figures at the end of my Caribbean adventure, I discovered that I had pretty much paid for the hotel, airfare, and meals for the whole trip. I suppose this might just mean that a follow-up visit is called for at some point.

Friday, January 2, 2015

The History of No-Limit Hold 'Em


I guess it takes some audacity for me to claim that I can summarize the entire History of No-Limit Hold ‘Em Poker into a single blog entry. But blogging takes some audacity to begin with, so I suppose I’ll plead guilty as charged. Maybe it will help to say that my own evolution as a poker player mirrors the timeline that I’m about to lay out.

STAGE ONE: 1950s-late 1980s

No one really knows when the first hand of Hold ‘Em was played, or even where. The fact that its full name is “Texas Hold ‘Em” would seem to be a clue regarding the latter. It was definitely being played there by 1959, and within ten years it had spread to Las Vegas. Twenty years after that, it was declared a game of skill by the state of California, and poker rooms throughout that state (which had been spreading draw poker for some time) started spreading that game too. Even to this day, the twin epicenters of Hold ‘em poker are Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Although poker was legally – and legitimately – determined to be a game of skill, very few players happened to have any. Roughly 99% of all players at this time just played by feel, not really paying attention to which hands are best to hold pre-flop, or when one should fold post-flop. There are still plenty of players who play this way, and you can still find them in pretty much every game. In fact, nearly every poker beginner starts out at this point, and only a few graduate to the next level of skill.

STAGE TWO: Late 1980s-2003

By the time the 80’s were coming to an end, folks started noticing that some players were consistently winning more often than others; i.e., that it wasn’t all just luck after all. The players who were winning had been studying the game, and had figured out that the way to defeat the amateurs was to play a very tight game – folding the overwhelming percentage of the time preflop, and only going to war with the best hands possible. Then, when they did play a hand, bet aggressively to build big pots that they were more likely to win. The strategy even had a name: Tight-aggressive, or TAG. Players like Tom McEvoy, Chris Ferguson, and Phil Helmuth, Jr. were winning world championships with this strategy. T.J. Cloutier became the most successful tournament player in history by using it.

But the seeds of change were being sown, and the TAGs were about to be left behind by a new generation.

STAGE THREE: 2003-Today

The year 2003 was pivotal in Hold ‘em poker. Several significant events happened during this year:
·       A new TV show hit cable television, called the “World Poker Tour”. The show featured (mostly) well-known players playing for millions of dollars, with hidden cameras showing the audience the players’ hole cards. People were finally starting to see some of the strategy behind how winning players played. And since success breeds imitators, the WPT was just the first of over a dozen poker TV shows to hit the networks over the next few years.
·       An anonymous accountant with the serendipitous name of Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker Main Event – poker’s world championship. This fired the imaginations of would-be rounders all over the poker universe. If an amateur like Moneymaker could win the biggest game in poker, maybe they could too.
·       Internet poker started going mainstream. Someone playing online could play more poker in a minute than a live player could play in an hour. Some folks played more hands in just a few months than Doyle Brunson had played in fifty years at the live table.

As the popularity of poker skyrocketed, the TAGs from earlier days saw an opening and began to publish books evangelizing their TAG doctrine. A flood of material from authors like McEvoy, Cloutier, Sklansky, Gordon, and Ciaffone hit the poker universe. The seminal work was probably Dan Harrington’s series, “Harrington on Hold ‘em”. Harrington was himself a world champ, earning the tongue-in-cheek nickname “Action Dan” for his famously tight play. His disciples came to be known as “Harring-bots”. Sayings such as “tight is right” and “fit or fold” started gaining currency.

But behind the scenes, the oh-so-perfect edifice of TAG was beginning to crumble. The culprit? A new strategy, honed to perfection by hordes of internet players: LAG, or “Loose-aggressive”. TAG remains to this day a very effective strategy for cash games, where one has the luxury of sitting around waiting for the very best hands. But it’s suicide in tournaments. Bottom line, you just can’t wait for premium hands in tournaments; the blinds and antes will decimate your stack and make you a non-factor by the time you decide to play something. Consequently, loosening up your opening standards, which increases variance, is mandatory for tournament success. The “aggressive” component of TAG was still relevant in this new strategy. But tight was no longer right; and fit or fold meant failure.

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And this is the path my own personal game has taken. I started off with an understanding of the rules of Hold ‘Em but no idea of strategy (or even an awareness that “strategy” existed). Then I discovered – and read – pretty much every poker book that had been written by the TAG generation, and my game improved correspondingly. But tournament success continued to elude me. I would sit and watch my stack gradually get whittled away, implementing my TAG strategy to perfection. I came to realize that I needed to loosen my game, but wasn’t sure exactly how to do that. It wasn’t until I hired a coach with tournament success of his own that I started to assemble this final piece in my game. It’s definitely made my overall game much more successful … and more fun, too.