One of the drawbacks of playing mixed games online is that it’s tough
to find good games at the stakes you’d like all the time.  $3/$6 was
the only game running at Full Tilt on a Tuesday morning…which is
lower than I normally play, but to be honest, I probably make more at
this game than at $5/$10 because my BB/hr rate is better.

Full Tilt has watered down their red-name set of FTP “pros” to the
point where nobody knows who all of them are.  That’s fine, to be
honest.  But I wouldn’t ever expect one of them to be the worst player
in a hand.

Roger King, along with his brother, founded KingWorld, the television
syndication company that made Oprah Winfrey a household name and
brought Jeopardy back to the airwaves. King wisely used his found
fortune to gamble…really, really, really high. Some of my favorite
whale stories involve Roger King, who passed away last week at the age
of 63.

My favorite King stories are about his poker playing, a game he
insisted on playing at the highest stakes, with the toughest
competition, completely ignoring the fact that he wasn’t very good.
In his book on Stu Ungar, Nolan Dallas relays one story about a big NL
Hold’em game at the Bike, built around Roger King’s request to play.
King soon lost his table stake, and took a loan out from Johnny Chan.
King kept drinking and gambling, and lost the Chan money as well. He
then proceeded to hit up Stuey for another loan, about $150k…which
he also lost before calling it a night.

The next day, Ungar and his friend and handicapper Mike Salem went to
King’s hotel room to collect. Roger gave Stuey a really hard time,
saying they all set him up to get drunk and lose a lot of money, and
initially refused to pay. Eventually, they settled, and King wrote
Stuey a check for $75,000. Stuey and Salem left the room and started
out of the hotel, when Stuey stopped on a dime and ran back to see
King again.

Ungar couldn’t cash a check made out to him. He had no driver’s
license, no bank account. He had to get a second check, made out to
Salem.

The world needs more characters like Roger King. He will be missed,
both as a television visionary and a degenerate gambler.

I was thrilled to see the new PokerStars for Mac interface, as I like
my home Mac a lot more than my old PC. However, I forgot to click the
“Save Hand Histories” a couple days ago, so I lost the session that
contained several hands I thought were interesting. I’m keeping an
eye out for opportunities to demonstrate my “worse play in mid-limit
mixed games than Hold’em” theory. But since I don’t have all of them,
I guess I’ll just have to tell you about the pot I scooped in an Omaha
8/b round of a 10/20 HORSE game.

I was dealt AA34 with one suit. UTG, who was fairly new to the table,
called. I raised. Crazy Loosey Goosey Scandavian player made it 3
bets…so I assumed one of two things: either he had a strong
high-only hand, or was overplaying a low-only hand like A236 (less
likely, since I had two of the aces, and I was quite sure the UTG
limper had a similar hand to that, so he had one). UTG took some
time, and called the two bets. I 4-bet, and both players called.

The flop was J-8-5 rainbow. UTG checked, I bet, and Loosey Goosey
raised. UTG called…I now put both players on the nut low draw, and
figured I had a good shot at the high, so I 3-bet, and both players
called.

The turn was a beautiful 2, which also made two of my suit in addition
to my nut low. UTG checked, I bet, both players called.

The river was another Jack, which I figured may have, but was unlikely
to, ruin my scoop potential. One of the other players could have
AJ2x. Time to slow down a bunch. We checked around.

UTG showed A276. He was chasing the open-ended straight draw and got
counterfeied on the nut low. He was right to considering folding this
hand when it was two more bets to him on the flop. A naked A2 is fine
playing in a pot with four or more players, as it won’t cost you money
to get quartered on the low. But once the flop hit, he was trapped
into chasing three more bets, for likely only half the pot (a 4 makes
his straight, but also makes a low).

Loosey Goosey showed KK43, with the same suit as my ace. I, uh,
really have no idea what he was thinking on almost any street,
especially pre-flop. Even with a suited king, even with position,
there’s no way I’m playing this for 3 bets. His re-raise on the flop
is even worse, as he’s playing one overpair for the high and a
terrible low draw. On the turn, he’s trapped into chasing a straight
draw where he has to know at least two, and possibly more, of his outs
are gone.

Rarely will anyone in a 10/20 limit Hold’em game play this bad, for
this many bets (there were 19 big bets in this pot). I see it once or
twice every single session I play in a mixed game.

Next time, I promise to have a detailed hand history, and will select
a hand I’m not involved in (to avoid making it look like a “I’m the
shit” brag post).

I had my money on the underdog Ricky Hatton…I didn’t think he was a favorite to win by any means, but I figured that Mayweather might let him fight a fight where he could win. As such, I thought +190 was a good line.

This was Mayweather’s best performance in at least three years, and if this is the end of his career, it’s a much better way to go out than after the half-hearted sparring session with Oscar De La Hoya.

Other than the occasional tournament, I’ve been playing mixed games almost exclusively for the last month or so…with well-above-expectation success. In a run of about 20 sessions, I was around 11 BB/hour over a total of about 50 hours of play (probably just shy of 3k hands). That’s running good, but I’m also finding some truly abhorrent levels of play. If you play a lot of 5/10 or 10/20 limit Hold’em, you’ll find maybe 10-15% bad players. In a HORSE session at those limits, the percentage is closer to 50%. I’ll be sure to post some hands in the near future which go to prove my point: if you’re limiting yourself to Hold’em, you’re missing out of most of the profitability remaining in online poker.

With success, though, comes a sense of entitlement. My last two sessions have been losing ones. Some of that is just about missing draws, especially in Stud 8/b…bricking the river to a flush and/or straight draw for the high as well as a baby for the low is an expensive way to play. But I’ve always been giving some opponents less-than-due credit. Sometimes people are going to make the right read that their 10-low in Razz or split Aces in Stud have been good the whole way. Sometimes people are good poker players and worthy adversaries.

Putting my confession down in words that I’ve let my head get away from me, and not giving credit where credit is due, will hopefully get me out of that habit. Play the players, good and bad, and keep your head on straight.

It’ll take me awhile to fully get over and accept a poker world without David “Chip” Reese. I’ve only been around him twice, and never formally met him, but he embodied everything a poker player should be. He was unflappable by bad luck and life-changing stakes. He played every game brilliantly, especially 7-card Stud (his chapter in the original Super/System was so comprehensive and so good that Doyle Brunson didn’t feel the need to cover the game in Super/System 2), and was one of the driving forces making the “Big Game” at the Mirage, and later Bellagio, a mix of all games rather than high-limit Hold’em or Stud. Reese was also a model of a gentleman gambler, super-competitive but polite and charming with everyone after the game was done.

If one considers poker a mountain, where good players from millions of home games across the world meet in local casinos, and those winners take their shots, and those winners take theirs, and so on and so on until you reach the stratosphere of super-high stakes and super-brilliant players…Chip Reese was the summit. The game is better off in every way that he chose to play it.

The recent revelations about Sorel “Imper1um” Mizzi and Andy McLeod, two of the best online tournament players in the world, have driven most poker discussion boards into a frenzy of allegations, accusation, and side selection. As always, people are looking to divide the various personalities and issues up into black-and-white chunks. And as always, it’s not that simple.

Almost everyone who has met Sorel really likes him. He’s a friendly guy, charming and funny. His poker skills are undeniable. And yet, he didn’t see a problem with repeatedly account-buying after the practice has been widely exposed as unethical, and defined by all of the sites as illegal. He also didn’t have much of a problem with throwing a couple of his “friends” under the bus as a way of apologizing for his actions. And, as Beanie pointed out in an article link, giving the “whole truth” scoop to a site other than the one that made him an online poker celebrity reeks of “what have you done for me lately?”

A large number of Sorel’s friends, acquaintances and/or admirers have chosen to pile on and bury him for actions that they KNOW many other big buy-in players are doing. Others have chosen to bury the buriers and vouch for what a good guy Sorel is, downplaying blatant and repeated cheating.

The truth is that nobody playing the biggest buy-in online tournaments is innocent. If you’re not multi-accounting, buying accounts, sharing on AIM, ghosting and being ghosted…you know someone who is. Either you believe it’s OK and you’re an unethical cheater or you’re choosing to protect an unethical cheater. There is no black-and-white here. It’s all shades of gray…some darker than others. The only pitch-black around here are the bruises around the eyes of online tournament poker.

I hope everyone else’s holiday was as good as mine. My wife does a turkey treatment with herb butter tucked under the skin so it gets really crispy, and the cavity stuffed with lemon slices and herbs to infuse the meat with a variety of flavors. Add in all the sides and dessert and there’s a reason my waistline is what it is.

None of those are good enough reasons to play your A-game, and I’m sure I suffer in some ways for it. I know I’m not alone, either. I would never dream of comparing my place in the poker industry with, well, anyone who’s actually IN the poker industry. But when I see a Howard Lederer or Taylor Caby making the rounds at the World Series, playing because they’re supposed, I feel a kinship. I get it. The trick is to stop it.

A couple months ago, I wrote a blog about Phil Hellmuth at a televised final table from this year’s WSOP, focusing how he took the bad side of every insurance bet with Phil Ivey. My theory, which I still believe, is that Hellmuth thinks the -EV of those bets is counterbalanced by being seen with “hip” people like Phil Ivey.

Some discussion about a hand from that table has come up recently on a couple of message boards. Hellmuth made a large raise pre-flop for approximately half his stack, then folded to a re-raise. The general consensus amongst the so-called intelligensia is that Hellmuth’s play is terrible, he’s getting way over 2:1, he should make that call with almost any two cards, etc. But Phil Hellmuth doesn’t think like any other poker player.

There is nothing more important in Phil Hellmuth’s world than being on television. Why else would he be interested in doing VH1’s “Surreal Life”, a haven for broke C-list celebrities who are willing to suffer any indignity to revive their careers? Hellmuth’s got 10x the money of everyone who has been on that show put together. In his mind, the more he’s on TV, the bigger his empire outside of poker can grow.

In keeping with that, I’m sure part of Hellmuth’s decision to fold for the other half of his stack is based on the cameras. Mathematically, against the range of some very loose opponents, it’s a bad fold. In the pseudo-math of TV-time value…it’s a different story.

Is he right? Or is there something as “too much of a good thing” when it comes to a personality that a lot of people can’t stand? I dunno. We’ll talk more about poker money without playing the game later.

A couple of blogs ago, I introduced you to Big J and Little J, a father-son duo who used to spend a good amount of time at Speeds pool hall in Dallas. In addition to taking some booking action, Big J spent most of his time hustling a little pool, throwing some darts, and in general, trying to come up with angles with which to put food on the table. By being unemployed, he got out of his alimonial responsibilities, and he had custody of Little J (I just assumed the ex-wife and her new boyfriend didn’t want him; I never asked and didn’t really care all that much). But being unemployed for several years does not pay the rent, so Big J was always trying to come up with additional scams and angles.

Some guys minded Big J’s approach quite a bit. He was ruthless and semi-desperate enough that no proposition he ever offered was remotely square, even to his friends, or at least, the acquaintances around Speeds. I’m not sure that he had any friends, in the “thick and thin, brothers til the end” sense of the word. Tom the Bartender’s friend Brad, in particular, used to get REALLY pissed at Big J about the Cowboys’ spread every week. “F’n A, J, the paper says the line’s Boys minus-4! You want me to give 7?!” I heard this every week, but Big J knew Brad was too lazy to find another bookie, and too much of a degenerate not to place a bet. Some people might have a problem with sticking it to a friend like that. Not me. Not really, anyway.

See, if you’re too lazy or too stupid to think through a bet and figure out how bad you’re taking it, then you deserve to lose it. Plain and simple. And you have no one to blame but yourself.

One night, I was playing 9-ball with Big J and after getting a few games ahead giving him the wild-8, he asked for a different spot. I asked what he had in mind…I knew I could probably keep beating him if we moved up to the call-7, but I also knew Big J would sandbag me to set me up for later, so I had my guard up. He said, “Let’s try something new. I don’t want a spot. Wouldn’t hurt you, boss…you’re good enough to smack me around the room however we do it.” Nice try. He continued, “When it’s my first shot, I get to move the ball three fingers in any direction. Sound OK?” I said I needed to take a leak and grab another beer.

A spot like that sounds pretty innocent…but I hadn’t finished unzipping my fly before I figured it out. With that advantage, he could set up his first shot every time to get the right angle for the next ball, making every subsequent shot MUCH easier. Worse, it also meant I couldn’t snooker him on any shot. Three fingers about as wide as a billiard ball, so he could always move out of danger. I couldn’t play
defensively if I wanted to. I’d have to run out every time (I was never close to THAT good) or rely on him to make far more mistakes that I’d expect him to.

I didn’t want to stiff Big J while I was up. That wouldn’t be proper, not with someone I saw all the time and used as a bookie. So I wasn’t going to turn him down, but I didn’t want to give back my profit on the night either. So while getting a beer, I told Stacy & Prof. James Acquaintance (who were loitering, staring at a soundless MTV) to come get me in 10 minutes and beg me to make a Taco Cabana trip. Big J and I split two racks with his three-finger spot, I said “adios” gracefully, and the chorizo-and-egg burritos were on me. Well, technically, on Big J.

A couple of years ago, there was a big scandal with a couple of New Jersey cops and former NHL player Rick Tocchet (who must have known these guys from playing for the Philadelphia Flyers) running a book operation. At the time, Tocchet’s boss was a guy named Wayne Gretzky…maybe you’ve heard of him. Sports icon. Perhaps the greatest player in any team sport, ever. The Great One. Wayne was, and still is, coaching the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes now, and Tocchet was the assistant coach.

Anyway, when the gambling ring got busted, only one celebrity name came out as to having placed action: Janet Jones, former model and actress, and wife of…Wayne Gretzky. The Great One’s reputation took a pretty solid hit, even though nobody accused him of anything, just because it was revealed what a degenerate gambler his wife is. She made TONS of bets, including really silly stuff like Super Bowl coin flip props (anyone who puts action on a coin flip, paying a vig, should immediately head to rehab…Do Not Pass Go).

The bottom line is there would be NOTHING smarter of Janet Jones Gretzky to do than to lay super-low for awhile, especially when it comes to gambling. I obviously don’t knock putting a little side action down on anything, but when you’re connected how she’s connected to a sport with a tenuous hold on the American sports market, you can’t just do whatever the hell you want.

So, what do I see when I turn on the High Stakes Golf action on ESPN? Along side Doyle, Dewey Tomko, Phil Ivey, Daniel Negreanu…partnering with Vince Van Patten…Janet Jones Gretzky. She repays everyone’s forgiveness by anteing up $125k in one of the bigger gambling props ever put on TV.

Wayne Gretzky is a small-town Canadian kid who happened to play a game better than anyone before, and likely anyone since. I don’t care how hot she was, and how much of a MILF she may be now…nobody deserves that kind of disloyalty. Yuck.

In my college days, I worked for a couple of years at the deli in the basement of one of the dorms. We served sandwiches and pizzas, and there was a common area with some tables and chairs, a jukebox, a couple of arcade games, and two 7′ pool tables, known to most good players as “bar boxes”. It was a place for us to hang out, and for me to make minimum wage playing pool with friends and strangers during slow times. One of my friends during that time was a guy named Pete, an electrical engineering major two years ahead of me. Pete came from money, and during the times he wasn’t outwardly flaunting it (flying the girl-of-the-semester to a resort in Cancun for spring break when the rest of us were piling 8 in a van down to Daytona, or in my case, working two jobs), he still wasn’t doing much to hide it. He had a mid-line Meucci cue in a hard leather case when the rest of us were schlepping our $30 Dufferins or Vikings in a soft pouch. Pete was charming, fun, and an entertaining guy to hang out with. He also liked
to gamble.

One night, a few people were hanging out with me in deli after closing time at 10 PM. Pete suggested we play a couple of racks of 9-ball at $5 a game. That was fine with me, as I knew I was probably a ball better than he was, and I certainly knew how the tables played better than anyone. After I won 5 of the first 6, he bumped it to $10/game to try to recoup his $20. I won the next 3, and he bumped it to $25/game. At 19, I don’t think I’d ever played for $25/game before…but I won the next three at those stakes, to be up a total of $125. I didn’t know that the condition called “tilt” had a name, but I saw it on his face and posture. His girlfriend Annie saw it too, and asked Pete to slow down a little.

No dice. “$50,” he said, and I won two more. This was quite the rush I was on…he and I both knew that I wasn’t THIS much better than he was, but there’s nights when you’re in dead stroke and the pocket looks like the mouth of a cave. Pete kept doubling up, trying to catch up. After $100/game, I was up $400. After one at $300, it was $700. $500/game, $900/game, $1500/game…it was nuts. Pete was frothing, Annie offered to do ANYTHING if he’d pay me off and go home with her, and I went to take a leak wondering when he was going to let me in on the joke and dig out a wad of Monopoly money or something, and how badly getting stiffed would fuck up our friendship.

After a few more games (he won one game out of four at $1500 per), I unscrewed my cue. It was 1 AM, I had a class in 7 hours, and since I knew this was completely surreal, I wanted to end it. I said, “Pete, you’re my friend, and I don’t like where this is going. You can pay me $1000 right now and I’ll buy the drinks the next time we go out.” Big mistake. HUGE. I had turned my engine off the moment the sentence left my mouth. Pete knew I was done, and more importantly, that I wouldn’t walk out the door. “Paul, what do I owe you, five grand? C’mon, let’s play a set for four.” He won the set by a couple of games, won a few more games at $200 per, and paid me off for the rest. It was 3 AM. I turned off the lights and locked the door behind us, leaving the keys in a drop box for the lunch crew the next morning.

We walked back to a couple of blocks back to our apartment building (he lived two floors below me) in silence.

Apart from the gambling lesson, I took one other thing from that night with me. Our friendship was never the same, but I used the $300 I won to buy my Meucci HOF-1 cue, 19.5 oz, 13mm pro-taper shaft. It’s a thing of beauty that I still have nearly 20 years later.

When I was just warming up to the crowd at Speeds’ pool hall (I don’t think I’d met Prof. James Acquaintance yet), I spent a good bit of sitting at the bar, letting my eye drift around the room to see what was going on and developing a huge crush on a waitress named Lisa. There will definitely be more on her in another blog, sometime. One night, over in the far corner, I saw a guy buried in the Sports section of the Dallas Times Herald, glancing from time to time at a biker-looking guy playing 9-ball with a midget. Well, at first I thought he was a midget. He reminded me a lot of my friends and I learning how to play pool in my basement as grade schoolers, a 57″ cue being 4 inches too long to comfortably handle, unable to make a proper stance without standing on the balls of your feet.

Eventually, the biker departed for the electronic dart boards. The midget got a dollar bill from the guy reading the paper and came across the room to feed the jukebox. As he came closer, the midget morphed into a short 14-year-old (I didn’t know he was 14 at the time, he looked younger). Finding just the right music proved to be a time-consuming chore: the jukebox not only had both country and western, but Skynyrd too…so many choices! While the kid was flipping back and forth, I motioned Tom the bartender over and asked who the guy in the corner was.

“Oh, that’s Big J. He takes some book and other action. Can’t play anything but 9-ball, and is too smart to try otherwise.”

“Lemme guess…the kid’s Little J?”

Tom laughed a big belly laugh (he didn’t have another kind), and replied “You got it!”

I can’t claim to be any great paragon of virtue when it comes to gambling or being where I probably wasn’t supposed to. I used to go with my great uncle to the track when I was a kid…he worked the windows and cage at Arlington Park and Mayfair, and used to let me go back there with him from time to time. I remember explaining to all my friends in junior high what the “6 1/2 - 6″ and “+140″ meant after each baseball game in the newspaper. And I didn’t have a problem taking lawnmowing money from high school guys in their basements on Friday nights.

But I was momentarily repulsed by the idea of letting a 14-year-old hang out in a pool hall. I mean, there wasn’t anything dangerous or nefarious about the place. I don’t remember ever seeing a drug deal or a fight. But c’mon! It’s a pool hall! Drinking, smoking, gambling!

As the evening wore on, I thought of all the kids I knew that didn’t have any father-son time at all in their teenage years. For Little J, it was “Take Your Son To Work Day”, all year long. Could be worse.

I liked Beanie’s list last week of the 10 things that he’s thankful for in his life…so I’m stealing the idea and doing one of my own. Five now, five later (in no particular order):

1) The Ramones - Besides being one of my favorite bands, they’re a tremendous inspiration. The story goes that when they first started playing, they used to audition for Hilly Kristel at CBGB’s every week…and get turned down every week. They were just awful. It took months for Kristel to give them a shot on an Open Mic weeknight…and the pinhead blitzkrieg began. A testament to perserverence and
originality (pretty funny sentiment from a guy stealing a blog idea, I know).

2) Dirty Jobs - I love a lot of the shows on Discovery Channel, but Dirty Jobs with host Mike Rowe (now the national spokesman for Ford) is hands down my favorite. Whenever I get a little pissy about a day I had at the office or a beat on the poker table, I look at Rowe cleaning out a septic tank or picking up roadkill with a one-liner and a goofy grin on his face and feel better. As much as we complain about what we may be doing, or what may happen to us…it could always get worse. There is no greater human attribute than grace under pressure or adversity.

3) Indian Summer - my favorite time of year in Minnesota is early October, when we get the last stretch of sunny days. Temperatures in the low 70s, usually low humidity, cool, crisp nights, and the trees are starting to turn colors. Just glorious.

4) iPods - I always carried around a transistor radio, Walkman, CD player, etc., since I was a kid. But they always had some hassle with them - radios had terrible sound, poor reception, and tuning them was a pain, as was lugging around a pouch of cassettes or CDs everywhere. The iPod is hassle-free, and even my old 20 GB model holds so much stuff that I have difficulty picking out what to listen to next. Or I put the thing on shuffle and let the player pick for me.

5) My kids - I heard a PSA (public service announcement) on the radio today encouraging fathers to develop a relationship and spend time with their kids. I will never understand anyone who doesn’t do everything humanly possible to be the best parent they can be, doing as much with their children as the day allows. I’ve intentionally changed career paths a couple of times because the job I had required more travel and less kid-time than I wanted.

NP: “Songs for Drella” by Lou Reed and John Cale. A beautiful tribute record to their mentor in the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol. Reed & Cale didn’t speak for more than a decade before getting together to make this record when Warhol died. By the end of it, Cale swore he’d never talk to Reed again, and kept that promise for another couple of years before getting together for a VU reunion concert in Paris (the “Live MCMXCIII” record from that concert is really good too, with a blistering version of “Heroin” among the highlights).

This one’s actually a two-parter….

As favorites, “popular” teams offer bad prices/lines when the team is excellent
As underdogs, “popular” teams offer good prices/lines when the team is lousy

It’s easier to explain the first part. By a popular team, I’m talking about a team with a rabid following. Sometimes this is a team with a national fan base: Notre Dame, Nebraska, Ohio State, USC…teams like that. Other times it’s a slightly more regional team but from an area of the country where sports betting is very common…Texas, Texas A&M or Boston College, for instance. When the team is good, their fans flock to the window, and as such, the line adjusts up, often times as much as two or three points. That’s a bad bet.

There’s a similar history with season prop bets, across all sports. Teams like the Cubs and the Packers have fan bases that will swing into a sports book on an annual trip to Vegas and put some money down on their team to win the championship. There’s a lot more action on those “color bleeder” teams than on the others…so the prop odds get worse. In the case of a team like the Cowboys or Raiders, a LOT worse.

The opposite of the corollary plays on the passion in the opposite direction. When Notre Dame is terrible (like this year), Irish haters pile on the favorite, in an attempt to take double pleasure from the squash. And the faithful usually overreact the other way in terms of stifling their action, and usually need an extra point or two from the line to balance out the action.

Bookies since the beginning of time have played on the emotions of fans to put things in their favor. Don’t let emotions get in the way of your money.