School is in Session

Sometime last week I found myself in the usual Garden City mid-day clusterfuck. There are some 20 games going (usually 2-3) and there is talk of starting a 40/80. Frank the prop is usually the main proponent of this move, as he always wants to gamble as much as humanly possibly in his 8 hour shift (after which he takes his wife, whom I have dubbed "bride of Frankenstein", to Bay 101, where they gamble more. I am perhaps being harsh on the wife because she recently cracked my ATs with T4o on a flop of TT4 in a 6 way raised pot but anyway). This is pretty incomprehensible to me, as the guy clearly doesn't win much, if anything, in these games, mainly because he is a gigantic alpha tilt monkey.

I can't stand Frank, as basically his goal in life seems to be either to put everyone on tilt or to simply lie in a attempt to get exactly what he wants to happen to happen 100% of the time, even though his job as a prop is really just to keep games going. He's very irritating, saying stupid stuff at the table and actively doing the things to fish that you just don't do (like saying "where are you going?" when they rake up or "seat open? come on in" when they walk past). All in all, I don't like the guy, and have adopted a policy of either completely ignoring him or, and this is more fun, saying exactly the opposite of what he wants or expects to hear 100% of the time with no concern whatsoever for the meaning of the words I'm using.

So anyway, Ned (name changed to protect the innocent....me) the worst floor man in the history of human existence walks around asking people if they will play 40 if he starts it. This is a stupid question, as my honest answer, 100% of the time, would be "It depends who is in it." The problem is that this is a very common answer, since while everybody who walks into Garden City is in some way functionally retarded, most can at least comprehend that playing poker with 8 people who are clearly better than you is a dumb idea. So usually enough people eventually lie to Ned the worst floor man in the history of human existence that he calls down the 40/80. This is a critical turning point in the day at Garden City, as one of two things is about to happen:

1. Most likely, after about 15 minutes of people slowly getting up from their games and ambling towards the 40 table, we get a hand off 6 ways with two props, Frank and his buddy and translator Magic. Magic is a white older prop who plays very well and has a good head on his shoulders. He has taken it upon himself, it seems, to act as a buffer between Frank and the customers and floor men, probably so Frank won't get fired and Magic can continue to play shorted handed 40 with him and take all his fucking money.

2. The game is still born, never getting off the ground, and the 3 poor saps who gave up their 20 seats to sit in it are now furious with Ned and demand to be first on the list. Ned blames the customers, who, last I checked, were always right.

So we're going through this process but for some reason it's happening earlier than usual and I'm not yet in a 20/40 game. So of course I sit at the 40/80 table hoping that the game will actually go (since I have no 20/40 seat to lose), and sure enough we end up in the (1) situation from above. The game goes off 6 handed and Frank the prop goes directly to tilt (he does not pass go, nor does he collect two hundred dollars). He loses pot after pot and within 20 minute is stuck $1400. During this time I'm up around $800, basically through winning a couple of big pots by way of the "top pair top kicker" plan. Once, however, I stole Frank the prop's blind with some cheese ball (like A5o or thereabouts) that ended up making trips on the river, and he's rather hot and bothered about it. He also has fallen into the usual trap that bad players on tilt do, whereby they see a hand at the absolute bottom of your range and begin to assume that when you open raise in that situation you always have that shitty hand and completely ignore the fact that you could have, you know, kings.

So we're doin' our thing, makin' the gamboool, slingin' the chips, and the following hand, annotated with humorous banter, occurs:

It folds to me in the CO, which in actuality is like UTG+3 because we're 7 handed. I open raise with Ace-Queen offsuit. Frank looks at me and says "Stealing again?" and then...cold-calls on the button. This is the usual response of bad players when they feel they are being pushed around. You raise? I call! This is obviously terrible, awful, obscenely horribly strategy unless you have pocket Aces, and even then is debatable stupid. The terrible small blind cold-calls like the champ that he is (he has shown down, for two bets preflop, such gems as 74 soooted and T9 off in just the last 10 hands or so), and somehow the big blind tosses his cards forward instead of 4 chips (beats me...everyone makes mistakes I guess?). I look at Frank and declare "It's time for plan B." He says "Plan B? What's Plan B?". Obviously plan B is to flop a pair....

So we're 3 handed for 7 bets, and the order of operations is Idiot, Jesse, Frank the prop.

J95 with two spades. Sadly, I do not have even a single spade, and Plan B has gone the way of the dodo bird.

The small blind checks, I bet, and Frank calls. The small blind folds, and the turn is:

J95-4 with still just two spades.

I check, and Frank says "That's plan B? Bet to see and check?" I respond in rhythm (see above regarding my plan to say the exact opposite of what he's expecting) "No, no, it's bet to check and see". My quick English skills are lost on Frank, and he repeats "So that's plan B?" I say to him, in all honestly, "Nope, we're on plan D now." You see, I completely whiffed on Plans A (steal the blinds), B (flop a pair), and C (c-bet, take it down), and have been forced to move onto my final plan D (check to Frank to induce a bluff).

Frank bets, and I think for about 10 seconds before calling. I do this to project weakness so that he'll think he can bluff the river and get the impression that I have a bad hand that won't pay off a thin value bet. Perhaps this was all lost on Frank, but whatever. I hollywooded it, and it was freaking fantastic. River....

J95-4-J with no flush

This river is fantastic. Frank's non-raise on the flop basically eliminates all Jacks from his range. I check with my left hand, while holding 8 chips in my right hand behind my stack. Frank bets, and the instant he lets go of a single chip I slide my right hand out and unfurl my call (sliding the chips forward in a line). He looks at me and says "Plan B?", still somehow confused. I say "Nope, Plan D" while waiting for him to turn over his hand. He realizes he has to show and rolls KQs. I look at the hand and shake my head declaring "no good" and roll my AQo, for basically the next best hand. The table generally concurs that my contingency plans are top-notch.

Bad Things Man, Bad Things

Curiously I'm in a bit of a funk, due to a pair of incidents both related and not to poker. I say curiously because I'm having the best monetary month of my life, despite posting a $2300 loss just yesterday.

First, on Tuesday of this week I got a late start to my poker day because I had lunch with a group of friends. We do lunch about once a month, and this month we even invited Tommy Angelo along and gave him a free roll in the credit card roulette game (blessedly I did not have to pay, bringing my life time record up to 2-2, with an average of 4.5 people in the game). Anyway, I got to Garden City around 2pm and restricted myself to playing just 20/40. Three 2 plus 2 friends were in attendance, and the four of us hopped from table to table like rabbits on crack (at least Yoda and I did). I dumped almost a rack in the 8/16 game before getting a 20/40 seat, won over 2 racks, then slowly but surely lost my chips back until I left around 7:30pm up about 300 bucks for the day. I left early because I ran into Fivos at the gym and this reminded me that I didn't really have a good excuse for missing a regular home game my friends were playing that night....yet.

On my way from Garden City to Mountain View, Danielle called me in quite the tizzy. It seems that our dog, Tyson, had managed to get himself sprayed by a skunk, and Danielle didn't know how to proceed. I immediately suggested the time honored hill billy tradition of tomato juice, which she quickly decided was a bunch of hogwash. Turns out tomato juice just masks the smell, sort of like burning a match after you devastate a bathroom. Anyway, I stopped in at the home game and called Danielle again, and this time she made it a little more clear that she wanted me to come home and help deal with the situation. At this point in the story one might ask "How did the dog get skunked? Don't you live in suburbia? Why was he off leash in the presence of skunks?" I will leave the answers to these imponderables as an exercise to the reader, or perhaps Danielle.

So home I went, and under the hose went Tyson. Turns out the correct solution to the problem is a mixture of baking soda and either vinegar or hydrogen peroxide. The compounds react to release free radicals that bind....yada yada yada. It sorta worked, but that night Tyson was still too smelly to sleep indoors and had to spend the evening under the stars on our deck (in a dogloo, with a low temperature of like 56....just so nobody calls the SPCA on me or anything).

Yesterday Tyson was still quite a bit smelly and was obviously depressed. He wasn't wagging his tail, and was obviously longing for human contact. He's a very affectionate dog you see....Danielle and I did still have to go to work, though, and my day couldn't have been worse. I spent several hours in the 20/40 game, at first winning then slowly but surely getting myself stuck $800. I was about to leave to go watch Game 7 (GG Caps), when a fantastic must move 40/80 was called down and, despite having only 60 minutes left in my day, I could not resist (I tried this exact tactic Monday and it resulted in a $3000 win). I lost $1500 on some incredible suckouts, with Hung (a regular who talks constantly and is just a huge pain the ass) doing most of the damage. On my final hand, when I was racked up and ready to leave, I raised AKo under the gun. Hung called out of the big blind (his shenanigans had been very bad today...he'd actually 'play slapped' my hand twice pretending like he could stop me from raising and after I'd lose a hand he'd say things like "How stupid can people be? Never learn...." and the like) and the board ran out:

K57-Q-8

He check/raised me on the river and I paid off his 64. He said "Thank you so much it's been so great beating you and taking your chips". As I was walking away I said "fuck you to, Hung" and he kept talking and eventually started blowing me kisses (something he'd done a few times before and makes me just want to punch him in the face) and then I called him a punk ass little bitch and walked to the cage. He is a punk ass little bitch, but losing my cool like that is just unacceptable and I felt horrible. The hockey game cheered me up a bit, and afterwards Danielle and I took Tyson to Scrub A Pup and repeated the baking soda and vinegar bath. Today I couldn't even bring myself to drive down to San Jose, for fear I'd see Mila (who was at the table) and get a lecture from here (which I deserve) about losing my cool at the table. I decided to play at the Oaks and posted a $999 win, so I guess it worked out....but yeesh, that was scary. If I hadn't put some distance between the two of us I think I might have actually hit him, and that could get me suspended or even banned from Bay 101, not to mention in trouble with the police and so forth. And from now on Hung, who is irritating but at least doesn't usually target me specifically, is going to be even worse. The moral of the story here is that it's very important not to lose your cool at the table, especially if you're doing this for a living.

Random Pimping of Something Cool

My friend wrote an iPhone App called iThirsty that I think is pretty cool. It works just like the Urban Spoon Application, which randomly selects a restaurant for you in slot machine fashion based on preferences that you input. The only difference is that his app helps you get drunker instead of fatter, which is always a plus.

Poker is Like Golf

I was thinking about this the other day, and thought it might just be interesting enough to write about. So here goes. I think that going to the casino to play poker is a lot like going out to play 18 holes of golf. Or at least I think I can talk about in such a way that we can see some contrived similarities.

1. The Teebox

When you go play a round of golf, you'll hit 18 tee shots in about 4 hours. When you head to the casino for a round of limit hold 'em, you'll probably enter the pot preflop a little more often than that, but not too much if you play like me.

Amateurs focus on the tee shot. People who suck at golf (like me) spend a lot of time at the range hitting their drivers. Amateurs tend to focus on preflop skills. People who are just learning poker (as I once was) often start with a preflop hand chart that tells them what hands they can play from what position and so forth. This chart is helpful, but falls pretty short of telling the whole story. Hitting a pretty drive is helpful, but hardly assures one of making a respectable (or even recordable) score on a given hole.

Tee shots vary greatly in terms of type and degree of difficulty. Downhill par 3, playing with the wind and no bunkers? Gimme the wedge and I'll just whack it down there. Now to the expert, there is of course much more involved. 440 yard par 4 with water up the left side and trees on the right? Yeesh. Preflop spots are the same. 2 players have limped and you're on the button with JTs. What should you do? The answer is "Put some damn money on the pot". How much? Doesn't much matter I don't think, and if it does answering the question requires a discussion of a ton of factors (how tight are the blinds? what about the limpers? will they check to you if you raise, or do they like to donk? what about your image?) An expert golfer would probably take a ton of things like these into consideration before "whacking" the wedge down at that par 3. Are there plateaus on the green? How much spin can I put on this? Should I play a fade or a draw? I'd just hit it. And an amateur poker player probably just picks an option with JTs on the button without thinking about any of the stuff I mentioned.

2. The Fairway

At this point in the hole you have to make the best of what you've left yourself off the tee. Sometimes, you'll be sitting pretty in the middle of the fairway, about to hit a nice 6 iron into a green the size of an Ikea parking lot. Others, you'll find yourself in jail, amongst a grove of sycamores, 270 yards from the hole with water in the way and two bunkers where you'd like to try to pitch out back onto the fairway in some hopes of scrambling together a bogey.

In poker, the analagous spot is the flop. You've hit your tee shot preflop, and sometimes you end up in just beatiful position. You could have Ace King in late position with only two opponents. The flop comes down K82 rainbow. This, my friends, is a pitching wedge from the short stuff. Sometimes, however, you find yourself in the proverbial woods. You raised with pocket 6s from the high-jack. Both players behind you called, then the small blind made it 3 bets. Now you're 4-handed in a bloated pot, and the board comes down the same, K82 rainbow. You could try to just pitch out onto the fairway, or even pick up your ball and walk to the next tee box. Or, you could go for the the power draw, hitting your driver off the bed of pine needles through the tiny alley you think might be clear all the way up to the green. The only problem is that a good portion of the time your ball is going to come rattling back towards you in the form of a re-raise. Now you're in even deeper, as the pot is huge and you've practically got odds to draw to 2 outs.

3. The Green

I've often heard that improving one's play around the green is the quickest way to shave strokes off a bloated handicap. My personal experience contains no evidence to refute this claim, as I often spend over half my strokes on a hole trying to move the ball the last 10% of the way to the hole. I leave my iron shot 15 yards short, then chip the ball onto the green....but it rolls off the back. Then I putt from the fringe, but leave myself a 5 footer to make 6. Which I often miss.

Turn and river play are like this in limit hold 'em. Amateurs and beginners tend to go with their first instincts when they play the big streets, especially the river. They bet when they think they have the best hand, and it's about as simple as that. More experience players realize that it's not nearly so simple. If you rate to have the best hand 60% of the time on the river, in position, you probably shouldn't bet. Sure, your hand is probably winning, but how do you like your chances once he calls? Assuming he doesn't fold any winners (a safe assumption about many of the players I play against), he'll call and win 40% of the time. If he can fold even 1 out of 3 of his losers, your bet is break even. Any more than that and you'll actually be driving yourself to value town. The point I'm trying to make is that most beginners struggle mightily on the river and don't even really know it, just like most crappy golfers struggle around the green and aren't really sure why. And in both cases, putting some work into improving would show immediate dividends.

So there you have it. This honestly didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, but I don't have the heart to scrap it. If you want your 5 minutes back, please submit a request to the customer service department.

So I wrote the above about a week ago (well, I started it then and finished it a few nights ago) and just now put it up. But today I learned of an interesting poker/golf related challenge that has been thrown down by leatherass, much in the same way durrrrrrr has laid anyone in the world 3:1 that they can't whoop him (for those of you who don't know, Tom "durrrrrrr" Dwan made an open challenge to any takers that over 50,000 hands of absurd stakes heads up poker that he will win. He laid all challengers $1,500,000 : $500,000 on the bet). The leatherass challenge, so far as I understand, works like this.

Step 1:

Play eight (8) nine hole matches for 50K a pop. I'm not sure if it's stroke play or match play.

Step 2:

Award the cumulative 72 hole winner 100K

Step 3:

Play ten (10) 50K headsup no limit hold'em freeze outs

Step 4:

Profit

I think the challenge is interesting and certainly shows that leatherass has some big cahones. But I'm at a loss for why no top PGA tour pro has taken him up on this one. Rumor has it that leatherass is about a +4 handicap. By the metrics generally used, I'd assume the 10th best PGA tour player would be something like a -3. Perhaps I don't understand something about golf (as I noted above, I suck), but wouldn't the tour pro basically be on a free roll? What are the chances that he'd lose even a single 9 hole match? The challenge is supposed to be scheduled over 4 days, leaving 2 days for the heads up poker matches. Even assuming they'd take 3 hours a piece to complete, we're really only talking about using a structure that expects hundreds of hands per match. In a match that short, in a game with as much luck as texas hold 'em, I have to believe that a reasonable player (one with basic heads up NL hold 'em skills) could expect to win at least 1 or 2 matches, even when he's obviously outclassed (leatherass is one of the most accomplished online cash game players...ever).

I'm curious what other people think, so feel free to post comments.

Just A Hand; OK, Two

I played this hand in the Bay 101 40/80 game on Monday, and thought it was interesting. The villain usually plays 80/160, and since I usually play 20/40, we've seen each other around a ton but don't really have much history.

The results, which aren't yet up in the 2 plus 2 thread, are that he checked behind on the river and courtesy showed 77. If you're gonna 3-bet with 77, you really can't just give up like that, at least in my opinion.

Decided to add a second hand....besides, it's not every day you can make a $1500 mistake in limit hold 'em.

So I'm playing live 40/80 and somehow get mixed up in a pot with Q9 of diamonds. I suspect I was the big blind (in fact now that I think of it, that was almost surely the case) and the raise came from early position. We saw the flop at least 5 handed, maybe 6 ways, which was:

QT8 with two diamonds

In other words, gin. The preflop raiser is very loose preflop, but tends to be passive after the flop. He's bad. The first two cold callers aren't awful, but the third is quite so. I check to the preflop raiser who dutifully bets (he's passive, but this is 40/80). 3 players calls and I raise the entire field. Everyone else calls. The pot is now, if I remember correctly, 11 big bets.

My memory is now failing me, as I completely forget the turn card. It wasn't a total brick, but it didn't much help me either. Let's call it a black 6.

QT8-6 with two diamonds

I lead, as I put in the last action on the last round and, since I didn't get 3-bet, I think my pair of ladies is probably still the best hand. Even if it's not, I have 9 diamonds to make the virtual nuts, 3 more jacks to make the idiot end of a straight, and 5 queens and 9s of non-zero value. The preflop raiser calls, one player folds, another player calls, and the aforementioned terrible cold-caller raises. I cry inside, don't think long enough, and call. Right after I do it, I look back at the terrible player's chip stack. He only has 6 chips left! This changes everything. First of all, the fact that he's almost out of chips makes it far more likely that he has some sort of hand that is much further from "the lock down nuts" than usual. This line....call....call on the flop. Then raise the entire field on the turn, usually screams monster. But when going all in, players, especially bad ones, do particularly idiotic things. Second of all, the fact that he doesn't have enough chips to 4-bet (which I'd have to call) means that 3-betting is much cheaper than usual. I had a chance here to put 2 big bet pressure on the preflop raiser and the first cold caller for a great price. I might get one of them to fold the best hand. They assuredly each have some outs (what with me having one pair of queens at the moment), and getting them to fold a hand with even 3 outs is worth an entire big bet in a pot of this size (it's around 15 bets, which means their equity is about 1 big bet with 3 outs). But I was asleep at the switch and just called, then watched in horror as both other players called. The river bricked off and it checked through. The preflop raiser won the 19 big bet (~$1500) pot with AQ, that he played in absuredly passive fashion, and I felt like an ass for the next 30 minutes. He claimed he would have mucked had I 3-bet, and I believe him.