Poker is BORING

Every so often a friend of mine tells me that he (or, on occasion, she) would like to go to the casino with me and watch me play poker. Sometimes they even do. (The technical term for this is “to rail”.) But they only do it once; and after having done so, they never offer to rail me a second time. And I’m not hurt by this dismissal, because I know exactly why they don’t want to come back:

Poker is BORING.

Excruciatingly, mind-numbingly boring. Stick-a-needle-in-your-eye-to-pass-the-time boring.

If you come rail me during a game, I can tell you exactly what you are going to see: You’re going to watch me fold every hand I’m dealt for an hour and a half. Then I’m going to play a hand where, possibly, I’ll put a whole bunch of chips in the pot. I’ll probably win the hand; or I might lose it. Regardless, after that hand, I’ll go back to folding for another ninety minutes.

If you watch me play a tournament, you might see me playing a few more hands. I've got to; in a tournament one just doesn't have the luxury of sitting around waiting for a big hand.

You’ll leave the poker room glassy-eyed, and likely with me still at the table. You’ll wonder how I could possibly spend ten or twelve (or more) hours straight doing this kind of thing. And I’d be happy to answer that question.

To me, poker isn't boring. Not in the slightest. In fact, it is riveting. There’s nothing I can think of (besides football) that’s more exciting to watch on television than ten or twelve hours of poker. I’m on the edge of my seat with the turn of every card. My mind is whirring at a thousand miles an hour, considering:

·         The math of the hand – who has the best chance of winning it at the moment, and why, and what cards could change the math on the next street.

·         How this information could (and should) affect how the players play the rest of the hand.

·         What the players might be thinking about their opponents’ holdings, and impact that could might have on the way they play their own hand.

·         How I would play the hand, and why.

·         How the hand could be played more effectively to extract more chips from the losing player.

·         How the hand could be played more effectively to minimize the loss to the winning player.

·         And an uncountable myriad of other concepts.

Sometimes I’ll even back up the recording and replay a street, or a hand, or even the entire episode, to make sure I haven’t missed anything.

Being at the table in person isn't that much different, although I have less information to go on because I can’t see the cards unless the players decide to show them. However, the stakes of paying attention to what’s happening are infinitely higher, because these are the players I will be going up against myself. That’s sufficient inspiration to maintain my attention.

It definitely takes a special kind to be a poker player.

Playing Poker with James Woods

WHO HAS TWO THUMBS AND KNOCKED JAMES WOODS OUT OF THE TOURNAMENT?

One of the highlights of the tournament I played at Foxwoods over the weekend was knocking James Woods out of it. Playing against him was very interesting. He has an unusual and distinctive style, but it’s one I've seen before and so it didn't take me too much effort to adjust to it.

James plays a lot of hands, which means by definition that he plays a lot of garbage hands. And he sticks around in pots for multiple streets, especially if he's hit a piece of the board such as middle pair. Believe it or not, it's because of this fact that his middle pair ends up being best; his opponents become so frustrated that they will start playing back at him. But James has a decent post-flop game, so he ends up winning more than his fair share of hands that make it to later streets.

In addition to his general loose style, he also overbets on every street. For example, during the 25/50 level he brought it in for 400 in middle position (I’m more likely to bet 125-150). This bloats the pot early and takes opponents out of their comfort zone. He also has a rather deliberative pace, shall we say. This doesn't go over well with the typical fast-acting, East Coast player. Sometimes you can put a player on tilt just by playing very slowly against him. (It doesn't work against me though. I don’t care how slow you are.)

Too many opponents will try to play back at someone like this by also playing garbage and seeing if they can win as well. But since James has more experience at that, it's not going to be a winning strategy for them. My approach is to play tighter than usual; i.e. play only really good hands. This is obviously something I'll have more experience with than James does, so now we’re playing poker on my ground. If I don't flop good, I let it go. If I DO flop good, I'll be more likely to let him bet for me until showdown, when I scoop.

It definitely helped that I was three to his left; not counting the blinds I had position on him in every hand except once each orbit. Any hold'em player will tell you what a huge advantage this is: I was able to see what he was going to do before I decided to commit my action.

We played a total of four hands heads-up. The first hand was early, before I’d gotten the hang of his particular style, and he won that hand. The other three hands I won, including the one that knocked him out of the tournament. (In case it matters, my AK beat his A9).

Including James, there was a total of 251 players in this tournament, and I ended up cashing in 21^st place, so not a bad result I must admit.

From -$1000 to +$1000 : A $2k swing in just two hands

This is what a $2000 chipstack looks like.

I worked a 12-hour session at $2/$5 no-limit yesterday at Foxwoods. This is a tough room for a lot of reasons; one of which is that most of the folks who play here are professionals, semi-pros, or at the least regulars who show up frequently and play long hours. There are very few tourists such as me who just show up on a lark to play cards for a while. This isn't Vegas.

The maximum buy-in at this table is $500. I always like to buy in for the max, because if I strike gold I want to be able to win the most I can with it. If my stack drops below $400, I’ll add another bill to the table to bring it back up again.

Well, yesterday started out as one of the driest sessions I can remember. At one point, I went four hours without playing a single hand. I kept adding bills to the table, one after another, and after ten hours I was down $1000. I guess you could say that since I had around $500 on the table, I was actually net down only $500, but personally I don’t count the win until I leave the table. So in my mind, I was down one grand.

It wasn't any single hand that put me down. A loss rate of $50/hour on a 2/5 game isn't very much at all. I just wasn't getting anything worth playing.

As I always do, but especially when I am in the midst of a tough session, I examine my game very closely to see if I can figure out where I’m making mistakes. If I’m playing poorly, I’ll just get up and leave and admit I've been beaten. If I’m playing well, I’ll blame the cards and stay at the table. In this case, I knew I was playing very well. I folded Ace/King preflop in one hand when I could tell it was beaten (it was). In another hand, I folded pocket Jacks preflop for the same reason. The flop came A-K-J and the winner had pocket Aces, so I would have lost a fortune if I’d stayed in. I was clearly plugged into the table and making great reads. Nevertheless, a loss is a loss, and the competition was extraordinarily good, so even though I usually can beat the 2/5 game at Foxwoods I decided that on the next day I would drop down to 1/2 – an easier game for me, but one that doesn't bring in nearly enough money.

One of the things that so intrigues me about no-limit poker is how a player can spend hours building up a monster stack, winning hand after hand, and then lose it all in a single bad call. It's something I see nearly every session (although it hasn't happened to me yet). But I didn't think I would be on the receiving end of this experience.

It was ten hours into the session when this hand came up. I was dealt 66 in middle position. I limped in, deciding ahead of time to call the raise that would surely be coming. Sure enough, the player on my left who was a very good loose aggressive player (but then they all are at this room) popped the bet up to $25. There were four callers, including me, so five of us went to the flop.

The board came out K-6-4, so I hit complete Yahtzee. An early player checked; I checked; the opener popped in a good continuation bet and got two callers. When it came back around to me, I check-raised half my stack. The opener folded and the other two callers came along.

The turn was an Ace. It checked to me; I bombed the pot with an all-in. One player folded; the other hemmed and hawed and then called. The river was a brick and I nearly tripled up with my flopped set. From $500 to $1500 in one easy hand!

The very next hand, I was dealt pocket Kings. This time I played it fast. I raised a decent amount and got two callers. The flop was T-8-6 with two diamonds (one of my Kings was the diamond). I c-bet big and the two callers came along. The turn was another diamond. I bombed the pot again, and both players folded. So now I was up even more.

I stayed with the game for another two hours, and kept building my stack, but fatigue finally took its toll and I decided to leave before I started making mistakes that shrank the stack back down. But there’s more poker to be played today!

Steve's Poker Blog: The Next Generation

Welcome to my new blog. Same as the old blog, just a different address. I couldn't remember how to log on to my old blog, as it'd been so long since I posted regularly. So rather than continuously hack into it (until Google finally shut me out once and for all, that is), I just decided to leave it there and start a new one.

The old blog is still there; feel free to check in on it if you ever want to experience "Steve's Poker Blog The Early Years." www.StevesPokerBlog.blogspot.com

I have copied over the last two posts from that blog to provide some continuity. All future posts will be exclusively here. Enjoy!

Peru Poker Trip

In the summer of 2012, we took a two-week vacation in Peru. We have friends who are Peruvian, and they invited us to come back with them. We did all of the touristy things while we were there -- went all over Lima, and then on to Cusco (the Incan capital), but the (literal) high point was Machu Picchu. I blogged about it thoroughly as "Notes" on my Facebook page and posted dozens of pics ("Mucho Machu"), so you can go read it there if you want. And if you're not my Facebook friend, why not? I've been told I sometimes post some funny things.

Lima has a handful of casinos around the city, and a few of them have poker rooms. I of course could not resist checking them out, and so even though I was somewhat hampered by the language barrier I made sure to sit down in a game or two and see what it was like.

First of all, you can forget finding a game that starts any sooner than midnight. The Peruvian currency is called the sol (plural soles, pronounced using two syllables). Each sol was worth, at the time, around 35-40 cents, so we're not talking high stakes.

The players are terrible; there is a good reason why Peru has never produced a championship player. The game plays much more slowly than in Vegas, sometimes as long as five minutes per hand. If you want to check, you say “Paso”. I found this is a bit confusing, because in England if you say “I pass” that means “I fold”. So I was afraid to actually say “paso”; I just tapped the table to check.  “All in” is how you push all-in, although it’s pronounced more like “all een.” “Llamo” is call, which makes sense. A Flush is “Colór”; a Full House is “Full”, pronounced “fool”; and they call Four of a Kind “Pokér”.

There were almost no female poker players to be found. Then again, the conversation around the poker table is of the locker room variety. Very useful for learning Spanish slang, if nothing else.

One of the more notable things about the game there had to do with the rake. In the states, the poker rake is 5% up to a cap of $4-$5 (sometimes more, sometimes less). This, by the way, is probably the single biggest reason why low-limit games are so difficult to beat. The competition at higher limits might be tougher, and you may not win as many big blinds, but the amount of dollars might end up being more because the juice hits a ceiling. In Peru, however, there is no cap on the rake! So even if the pot gets to a thousand soles or more (and it sometimes did), the dealer will pull in a rake of nearly a hundred soles before he pushes the pot.

All in all, I think I'd rather play in Vegas. But the game was very good and definitely lucrative, and I would go again if I had the opportunity. And by the way, one of the Latin America Poker Tour stops takes place in the casino I visited, the "Atlantic City" casino.

Resurrecting the Blog

I had literally forgotten all about this blog. I was (virtually) cleaning out an old laptop, and found some old entries, and well … I guess we’re back in business.

I never really stopped playing poker, although it lightened up significantly after “Black Friday”. Like the death of JFK or the attack of 9/11, if you were a poker player you’ll always remember where you were when you heard about it … I was in Pendleton, playing their Spring Round-up, and in the hallway I overheard some poker luminaries discussing the shut-down (Linda Johnson, Jan Fisher, Susie Isaacs). I wasn’t sure what they were referring to … a temporary outage of some kind?

Anyhow, I finally learned the whole tragic story.

So there’s not much online poker anymore, and of course none at all in Washington State since it’s a felony. But as I travel a lot for my day job, and since there are plenty of card rooms across the country, it’s easy to find a game to sit down in. I’ve been playing a lot in L.A. lately, as well as Foxwoods and A.C. on the East Coast. I even checked out Mohegan Sun once, but the games there are very hard and I don’t know that I want to go back.

I’m pretty happy with where my cash game is nowadays. Lately I’ve been trying to sharpen up my tournament game. I played a WPT main event at Borgata last year (made it to Day Two but didn’t cash); a WSOP bracelet event (made it to Day Two but didn’t cash), and of course Pendleton’s Round-Ups (in the last one I cashed in two out of four tournaments, which is an extraordinary accomplishment).

I met a couple of guys at the last Round-Up, Grant and Jonathan, who are poker coaches. Their operation is called the Portland Poker University (www.pdxpkr.com). I went ahead and hired Grant – the tournament expert – and my tourney game has gotten a lot better just in the few weeks since then. I knew that my successful cash-game style was too tight to work in tournaments, but I wasn’t sure how to loosen up. Grant has shown me how and where to do that, and we’ve also worked on overall hand-reading (which is very helpful). He’s a terrific instructor and the investment is already paying off.

Portland does have poker rooms, which I never realized before. Actually, they’re more like private clubs. You buy a membership ($5/day or so) and play all the tournament poker you can stand. During my on-site visits with Grant, we’ve been playing some of them. Last weekend, cousin Dave and I played a tourney at a club called “Aces”. I finished in the money (sixth out of 80 or so players), and there’s no doubt at all that my results have improved because of the coaching. For example, here’s one hand that tells the story:

It was very early in the tournament, before antes kicked in. Blinds were something like 200/400, and we all had deep stacks of over 50,000. I was in the big blind. Action folded all the way to the button, who limped. The small blind completed. I looked down at QQ and decided to pop it … made it 1300 to call. The button called, and the SB folded.

The flop came nine-high with two diamonds, and so I continuation-bet around 1600. The button put in a giant re-raise to 5000. This was such an odd move, that I had to stop and think about it for a while.

I gave some serious thought to just folding. There wasn’t much in the pot, and I didn’t want to risk losing a lot of chips so early in the tourney. But I tried to figure out what hands could be ahead of me right now.

First of all, my opponent was a really good player. I could tell that just from watching the action at our table. He’d seen me continuation-bet a lot of flops and clearly knew that I’d stolen a lot of pots holding nothing. He probably thought I was doing it again … he can’t have known just how strong my hand was. It was a good move, if that’s what he was doing.

But what could he have that beats me? AA or KK would probably have raised pre-flop, rather than just called the button. A flopped set or two pair probably would have raised less on the flop, or even just called, to keep me in. I couldn’t put him on a flush draw either. Frankly, his raise showed me that he didn’t want me to stick around. The best hand I could put him on was something like A9 – top pair, top kicker. But even that might be an overestimation. (This is the kind of thinking that Grant has been encouraging in my game.)

I called that flop bet, and he was visibly displeased. Since the pot was big enough to satisfy me, the turn and river went check/check, and when I showed my unimproved Queens he mucked disgustedly.

I won another big pot from this same player later in the game, which ended up tilting him beyond any possibility of repair. Again, he was the button and I was the big blind. He raised preflop with AA, and I called with KQ offsuit. The flop was King-high, so I check/called his bet. Turn was a rag, so I check/called again. I actually thought I might have the best hand. The river was another King, which pretty much took away any doubt. I put out a very big value bet, he made a crying call, and when I showed my hand he literally bolted from the table and ran out the back exit. He lost over half of his stack to me on that hand. He did come back to the table – walking through the front door, so he’d literally stomped all the way around the building – but he didn’t last much longer, given his dark mood.

I have some poker trips coming up, and some tournament play planned, so we’ll see if I can keep this blog updated a bit more regularly.