Han Solo Poker

Remember that scene in Star Wars where Han and Chewie are chasing a bunch of stormtroopers down the halls of the deathstar? It takes the stormtroopers a few minutes before they realize "Hey, why are we running? We've got these guys out numbered!" and then they turn and chase Han and Chewie. Well something like that can happen at the poker table; you can rake in the pot if act boldly enough, but you have to take it down before the stormtroopers figure out what's going on. Sometimes weird things happen at the poker table and you can profit from the weirdness by acting boldly. In a confusing situation, the human instinct is to flee - so you can induce that flight instinct in your opponent by going on the offensive.

Case in point: I was playing a tournament in which I had made it to the final table with a sizable chip lead. I was playing very tight poker- and was well aware that I could now probably steal some pots based on my tight image. I was in the big blind, but I made the mistake of thinking I was under-the-gun and therefore first to act. I tried to fold my 7 4 off suit, but the dealer pushed my cards back to me, explaining that I'm in the big blind. Now technically speaking she made a mistake - even though I had folded out of turn, I had still folded and my hand should have been dead. But she gave me my cards back. No-one else at the table made any objection because they all thought it was funny that I made this mistake, and obviously I was going to fold if anyone raised my big blind. "That's a bit of a tell!" one joked and the others all laughed. And I laughed too - oopsie! Sure enough a guy in late position puts in a raise and it folds to me.

This is where I'm supposed to sheepishly fold, right? For some strange reason my instinct tells me it's time to do the unexpected. "You know, I think I might just play this. I call." This elicits more laughter. The flop comes with an ace and two rags - neither of which is a 7 or a 4. I check. My opponent bets half the pot and I don't even hesitate before pushing all-in. My thinking is that if he has an ace he'll call and i'll lose - but he probably doesn't have an ace. With less than top pair, he will almost certainly fold with his tournament life on the line. It is a confusing situation for him. If he really thinks it through, it will probably dawn on him that I'm probably bluffing but I'm counting on him folding before he reaches that point, that hey, why am I running? moment. Luckily for me the weirdness of the situation had him off-balance and he did what most poker players do when they are attacked - they fold.

Victories and disappointments

The extent to which you are in control of your life and the extent to which you the plaything of fate is something smarter people than me have pondered and written about. I will say this; it is human nature to believe that when you are successful it is do to your skill, and to believe when you are unsuccessful it is due to circumstances beyond your control.

We also tend to believe that victory and defeat have a lot to do with desire - we will win if we "want it bad enough." While I think this is true in a general sense, the "want it bad enough" myth doesn't always hold water. The Calgary Flames probably wanted to win that game last week more than the opposing team because they didn't want to be knocked out of the playoffs. They didn't like being told they sucked. But they lost anyway. In fact they may be losing so much because they are so desperate to win - they are second guessing themselves on the ice and "squeezing the stick too much."

Success, it seems to me, is most often the result of finding the sweet spot where determination dances with patience. Confidence in yourself as well as the wisdom to let the universe come to you.

***

Since my on-line melt down, I have limited my real-money poker to weekly live tournaments. The results have been pretty good: I have made the final table three times, going out on the bubble once and cashing twice - including a win. Still I have never wanted to win a tournament as badly as the one I entered last night - a charity event where half the proceeds went to a local animal rescue group. There were 91 entrants, with re-buys though the first four levels. The top nine got paid. I was knocked out in thirteenth position.

Maybe I could have done better if I hadn't wanted to win so badly. I squeezed the stick too hard.

The Sickness

There is something about a big score that allows you to indulge in a very destructive fantasy - that you have enough money to start taking sizable risks without fear of catastrophe. The fantasy of living consequence free is a particularly insidious delusion that has destroyed many. At some point in the slide down you really can't afford to lose any more, but you keep gambling anyway. After all, you are still way ahead, or somewhat ahead, or slightly ahead of where you were before your big score, so it's all good right? It's all gravy. Found money.

But when you hit the point where you have lost all your winnings you feel like an absolute shit-bag. You feel sick that you were given the gift of the big score and then flushed it all away. So what do you do? You try to win it back. You go chasing. Self-loathing and gambling losses feed each other, keeping you in a spiral that is stronger and stronger.

I write all this as a way of explaining my one-month silence from the blog. A month ago I wrote of scoring over 12k online. What I have been putting off writing for several weeks now is the follow up post telling of how I lost 4k in just over a week playing at higher levels than I had any right to attempt and getting my ass handed to me on a silver platter. During this downward spiral the voice of reason was pretty much bound and gagged in some padded cell of my brain, while Mr.Excitement and the Adrenalin Gang threw a party in my cerebral cortex.

I reached a point where I knew that if I didn't stop, then the trip to New York my wife and I had decided on would be in jeopardy. But how could I admit to losing 4k in a week? Better to win it back and pretend this little bad run never happened, right?

Somehow I found the strength to quit, probably because I knew I simply couldn't live with myself if I lost any more. It wasn't easy. It was very, very, very hard.

In late 2008 my father lost a half million dollars, about 80% of his life savings, in about three weeks. He did it the same way I did - he lost some and tried to win it back. He went chasing. The casino he played was the Toronto Stock Exchange. As his stocks started losing money he increased his positions, reasoning they would bounce back. This is called "Value Averaging"and is widely held to be a sound investment strategy, except when the stock doesn't bounce back...and in late 2008 no stock bounced back. It wasn't a downward spiral - it was a nosedive. My father took the financial loss very personally - he couldn't stop thinking of how much good that $500,000 would have done for his kids and grand kids. He couldn't stop feeling like failure. I tried to make him understand that I loved him not his bank-account but I had a hard time making him feel better.

After I lost my $4,000, I felt I understood my dad a little better. I can see how much harder it was for him to forgive himself than for others to forgive him.

So here, now, I'm coming clean. I lost 4k playing like a donkey.

I cleaned out my online account - with enough left of my big score so that we can take that trip to NYC. I took a week off from poker.

Since then I've done well at poker. But that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is that you, gentle reader, are going to do things in your life you may feel you can't forgive your self for. You feel like you should punish yourself. I wish I could be a voice in your head telling you to stop.

People love you, even if you don't love yourself sometimes.

"Gsquadstyle" is my hero!

....and "SantaLovesMe" is a helluva a feller too! Either one of these guys could have made a dumb move that would have cost them (and me!) a lot of money. But they didn't. They played it cool, God love 'em.

I was playing on PartyPoker this morning, at one of their "Bad Beat Jackpot" tables, when these two players were involved in the most amazing bad beat I've ever witnessed. And because I was sitting at the table when it happened, I got a cool $12, 426.

If you are unfamiliar with bad beat jackpots, let me explain how the one at PartyPoker works: Fifty cents from each hand that sees a flop goes into the jackpot. There are dozens and dozens of these bad-beat tables, so the Jackpot builds fairly quickly - I'd say by about $25,ooo every day. The jackpot builds until it is won by a qualifying bad beat - a hand of Quad eights or better that loses! To make it even tougher, to qualify for the Jackpot both winning and losing hands must use both their hole cards. How unlikely is this? I haven't figured out the odds, but I'd say it is about as likely as hitting two hole-in-one's in a single round of golf. Astronomically unlikely. When this particular jackpot is hit, 30,000 is taken out as "seed money" for the next jackpot. Of what remains 50% goes to the bad beat loser, 25% to the hand winner, and the remaining 25% is split between anyone else who was dealt cards in the hand.

Here's how this mornings bad beat went down:

I was playing at a six-player table with .50/$1 blinds. I was dealt a suited queen under-the-gun, and folded it. The next guy (Pumuking, who has a very amusing picture of a monkey as his avatar) also folds. Next is hero #1, Gsquadstyle, who has 10s 10h. He could have killed this whole thing right here with some kind of stupid over-bet, but instead he raised what was the standard $3. Lovely! The button (Slevin K) folds. SantaLovesMe is in the small blind and he has a very good hand - Ac Kc, but one that is vulnerable if he doesn't hit the flop. So he raises to $9.50. The big blind (VictoryCica) folds. It would have been pretty gutless of Gsquadstyle to fold here, and thankfully he doesn't. He calls.

The flop comes: 6c Qc Jc. SantaLovesMe flopped an ace high flush while Gsquadstyle is holding only a pair of tens. If SantaLovesMe makes any bet here, it is almost certain that Gsquadstyle would have folded...but SantaLovesMe is thankfully not that stupid - he knows enough to check the nuts. Besides there is a possibility his opponent has a set, so the the bad beat might come into play. I could kiss SantaLovesMe for that check. Gsquadstyle also checks, of course.

The turn is the 10c. This gives SantaLovesMe an unbeatable royal flush, but it also gives Gsquadstyle a set of 10's. I like to believe that at this point both players were only thinking about the possibility of a bad beat and making sure they didn't fuck it up. SantaLovesMe checks his royal flush (good boy!) and Gsquad bets about 2/3 the pot. This is NOT a mistake on his part - remember, since the flop there has been no betting, so Santa might have pocket 7's for all Quadstyle knows. This bet is a way for Quadstyle to sense if there is a possibility of a bad beat, and if not then he might as well scoop up the pot right here. Santa, you will not be surprised to hear, calls.

Now comes the river. There is only one ten left in the deck; the ten of diamonds, but if by some miracle it comes then ladies and gents we got ourselves a bad beat jackpot!

The river is the 10 of diamonds. A royal flush over quad 10's.

The players who folded pre-flop like myself get $12,426 each just for being there. SantaLovesMe (Yes he does!) gets $49,704 and the appropriately named Gsquadstyle gets $99,408 for hitting runner-runner quads and losing.

And I doubt I will ever see a hand like that as long as I live.

Poker Software

If you play poker online, you can use software like PokerTraker to gather statistics on your play as well as the play of your opponents. According to PokerTracker, the program "imports the hand histories that poker sites write to your computer. It then parses the hands and stores poker statistics about the hands into a local database so that you can look at every possible angle of both your and your opponents' poker game."

A friend of mine got a trial version and, while he was amazed at the amount of information available to him, is still unsure if it is worth the investment. I suspect all serious on-line players use some kind of software of this nature. Why wouldn't they? Still I have my reservations.

On a purely emotional level, I think it takes some of the fun out of the game. Win or lose, I know I don't have anyone (or anything) else to credit or blame. Poker is an individual vs individual game, and the introduction of computer analysis just spoils it somehow. I know this is kind of petulant of me. And maybe it's dumb to "bring a knife to a gun fight". I suspect that poker software is really now just part of the game - if all players are using it, then it is still an individual vs individual game, just a much more complex one where your success is not only based on poker skills, but the ability to quickly interpret and apply raw data to a specific situation. A more complex game - but still a game. My dislike for the software might just be laziness on my part - I don't want to do the work of having to analyse statistics!

But I also worry about statistics misleading me. If I have a good read on a situation, the statistics might lead me to make a wrong decision. Of course this could easily, and more likely, go the other way - that the statistics would likely keep me from making bad decisions.

I just don't know.

I'm hoping those of you reading this post will leave comments offering advice.

When to call without the best hand

Being a nit, I have always believed it is never wrong to fold a hand when I believe my opponent is holding a stronger hand. This is common sense, right? Only donkeys make calls like that, right? Well it's not so simple. The instances are not very common, but sometimes you should make the call even when you are certain your opponent is holding better cards than yours.

I was two hours into a live $50 buy-in tournament. We had started with 5,000 in chips and blinds of 25/25, but the blinds were now 800/1600 and many smaller stacks were in danger of being blinded off. I had a stack of about 25,000, which was the most at my table, (there were two other tables going as well) and so when it folded to me in middle position I thought it was worthwhile to take a stab at stealing the blinds. I had a tight image and my monster stack made it unlikely that anyone would wish to tangle with me. Holding KQ off seemed good enough, so I raised it to an even 4,000. Everyone folded except the big blind, who pushed all-in for a total of 4,500. Now I knew that this guy would not be making this move with anything weaker that what I had, but it would have been wrong to fold. The pot was now 9,300 and it would only cost me another 500 to call, giving me 18-1 pot odds. I knew the odds of winning the pot were slim, but the cost was so relatively cheap and the reward so relatively great that calling was the right thing to do. My decision was even more clear-cut because my opponent, being all-in, could not force me to put any more chips into the pot and the fact that everyone else had folded meant that no third person could muddy the waters. My big stack also meant that the loss of an additional 500 was not going to cripple me. So I called. As I expected, he had a better hand than mine; AK. His hand held up and he won.

Did the fact that I lost mean that I made a bad decision? No. I don't think I made a bad decision to call and I don't think I made a bad decision to attempt the steal in the first place- I think in a majority of cases my steal attempt would have worked, I just was unlucky that one of the four players after me had Big Slick. And I think that against the range of hands a short-stack will bet his tournament life on, KQ will suck-out enough times to be profitable at 18-1 pot odds.

Better players than me are very good at knowing when it is okay to call when behind. The example I gave here is pretty clear-cut, but knowing when such calls make sense is one of the things I need to understand better if I am going to be a better player.

How to play 3 4 off

When an ace hits the flop, players tend to focus on the immediate danger it poses and forget that the ace can play as a low card as well. For example if you see a flop like: Ah 9c 2s you immediately wonder if someone is holding an ace. You don't see a straight draw or a flush draw. If you have an ace yourself you wonder if you kicker is good. If you are lucky enough to have pocket 9's, you are praying someone else has AK and will pay you off. If the turn brings a 5, many players, particularly if they are holding a set or two pair, may not realize that anyone holding 3 4 has just made a straight. They bet pocket aces as if it is the nuts - and if the board doesn't pair on the river you will get ALL of their chips.

The ace-to-five straight, commonly known as "the wheel" is one of the sneakiest hands to hold. people just don't always see it coming, and they are less likely to see it coming when they are excited about their own hand.

Play the wheel draw aggressively - particularly if you have a tight table image. People will not put you on this hand. The element of surprise will be on your side.

I like playing 2 3 and 3 4 and 2 5. If I am first to act, I will often enter with a raise. My tight image has won me several uncontested pots this way - everyone thinks I'm holding a big hand and folds to me. When I do get a caller, I can be pretty sure they have either a "strong" ace (that is an ace with a big kicker) or a pocket pair- the exact hands that can fall victim to the wheel.

If I am in late position, I might also call with 3 4 pre-flop, particularly if their are many players in the hand. The more people that see the flop, the more likely someone will catch a piece of it and, hopefully, pay me off if I get there.

2 3 is an easy hand to fold to flops like K Q 10. I like playing hands that are easy to fold. Remember: in no-limit the plan is to lose small pots and win big ones.