Free Las Vegas Dollars

“Back to quits” is one of my favorite poker expressions, although I don’t think it is one that is all that commonly known or used. I don’t see it in The Official Dictionary Poker by Michael Weisenberg, accessible online over at Mike Caro’s site. Nor does it appear in The Poker Encyclopedia compiled by Ethan Allan and Hannah Mackay.

Can’t recall exactly where I first encountered it. I know Anthony Holden uses the phrase in Big Deal, which is why I think of it as probably more of a British term — like calling a player a “punter” or the pot the “pool.” Early in the book, Holden describes starting out his year-long experiment as a poker professional with some losses, followed by a couple of cashes in small tourneys and “a run of cards in a £5-and-£10 Hold ’Em side game, which got my bankroll back to quits.”

The meaning of the phrase is clear enough, I assume — getting back to even. I like the way the phrase connotes that irrational feeling we’ve all had that makes recovering one’s starting stack a requirement for leaving the game.

We know it’s wrong to think this way. “Perhaps the stupidest words in poker are ‘I’ve got to get even,” writes Al Schoonmaker in Your Worst Poker Enemy. “When you feel that way, you are in danger of turning an unpleasant loss into a catastrophe,” explains the psychologist. “You can get further off balance, play more poorly or perhaps go to a larger game or the craps table, desperately trying to get even.”

Thus do I like calling it getting “back to quits” rather than getting even, because the phrase tends to remind me that my real goal is simply to leave the game — which perhaps I should consider going ahead and doing rather than pressuring myself to recoup my losses. In other words, realizing that I’m simply trying to get “back to quits” sometimes helps me get up from the table sooner — not always easy to do. (Wrote about that a couple of times before, actually, in “Poker Sisyphean Challenge” and “The Long Goodbye”).

I sometimes marvel at how this mindfulness of how much I am up or down perfectly evokes the existentialist idea of “making meaning” — in this case, interpreting the meaning of my play according to what is necessarily a wholly subjective criterion that only really matters to me. In fact, depending on how aware my opponents are, sometimes I might be the only one who even knows if I’m up or down. And even if others are aware, they haven’t a true idea what the significance of being up or down (by a lot or a little) means to me, anyway.

It was during another session of Rush Poker (pot-limit Omaha, six-handed, $25 buy-in) that I found myself thinking about all of these things once again. Despite playing a few hands well early on, I’d taken a couple of unfortunate beats, then made a couple of missteps to take me nearly two buy-ins down. I gradually fought back, and without winning any large pots managed to get almost “back to quits” before signing off.

As those who have played Rush Poker know, with each new hand you are taken to a new table. After a while, you do start to see the same players, and it is even possible to get reads and use them (especially if you are a note-taker). But a lot of what happens in each individual hand happens without the usual contextual info of the standard game.

I realized absolutely no one knew whether I was up or down during my session. In fact, towards the end I was sitting with a fairly big stack (nearly three buy-ins deep), but was still down a couple of bucks. Nor did anyone know if I’d been playing well or poorly.

A hand came up where it folded to me on the button and I raised pot with a trash hand. As I did, I momentarily thought of my “image” and its significance (or lack thereof). My opponents didn’t really know if I was the sort of player who sometimes would raise with bad cards there. But I did.

As I waited for the blinds to act, I began involuntarily thinking about how I’d played the last couple of times it had folded to me on the button, actually considering — and maybe even being slightly affected by — the patterns in my own play. Patterns I had noticed, but no one else had.

The existentialist recognizes that while we play with each other, what the game means is necessarily going to be different to each of the players. And if for you getting to the end means returning to the beginning, well, only you may see the meaning of within.

Related posts:

1. Play the Game Had one of those unbelievably unfortunate sessions of low…
2. Play the Game Had one of those unbelievably unfortunate sessions of low…
3. S.G.S. Gaming gets Nevada Licensing for its Two Cards High Poker Card Game S.G.S. Gaming announced last week that its Two Cards…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Ooh, I left this here cup of coffee on the burner too long. Bitter. Gotta remember to grab that sucker more quickly next time.

For many, New Year’s Day is all about making resolutions, setting goals, and doing a general rethink of whatever it is about yr existence seems in need of such.

Well, maybe not right off. Could be all that important work of self-analysis comes later — after the effects of the previous evening’s let’s-party-like-there’s-no-tomorrow activities have sufficiently skedaddled, thereby allowing for relatively clear-headed cogitatin’.

I’ve certainly gone that route on January 1 numerous times. Might even be more tempting to do so here on the first day of the science-fictiony-sounding 2010 — a new decade. This-is-the-year-I’m-gonna… and then you fill in the blank. Or blanks.

Three years ago I kicked off the year writing about “Getting Off to a Good Start.” Was referring to something Barry Tanenbaum once wrote about beginning new sessions, but applied the idea as well to how one might approach any new stage in life.

Two years ago I began with a post titled “Looking Back & Looking Forward” in which I outlined a bunch of specific goals. Did accomplish some of those that year, but a couple got left behind pretty early on. One goal I set at the start of 2008 and did accomplish was the one of posting here every weekday, which I continued through last year, too. Not planning at the moment to deviate from that one in 2010.

Then I began 2009 writing about the “False Start” — the most frequently-called penalty in football, actually. There I suggested that false starts frequently happen at the poker tables, too. We’re excited just to be playing, and somehow it takes us a hand or ten to get our heads on straight and find our game.

Am a little too spent this year to do much more than look back at those earlier New Year posts. One reason is all the energy I put into a Betfair post, this one documenting the “Top Moments in Poker, 2000-2009.” Go check it out and let me know if I missed any of the biggies.

I will say this, though, as kind of a general introduction to 2010. I’m optimistic. Lots of reasons not to be, I suppose, if one has been reading any of those other, non-poker related “2000s in Review”-type articles over the last few days.

But I can’t help it. Like I say, I’m sitting here drinking this burnt-tasting cup of coffee, and while I should be grimacing, I can’t seem to get rid of this goofy grin.

Last year was a good one for me in terms of writing and poker, but I have higher expectations for this one. Am also anticipating other big “life stuff”-type changes in the new year, too, some of which I’ll chronicle here for sure.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll go get myself another cup of java. This one will be better.

Related posts:

1. WDIAV Kicks Off 2010 Right by Giving Away a $1,500 WSOP Seat in their New Year’s Day Tournament (Las Vegas, Nevada) 2010 will start out on a…
2. Women in Poker: A Guy’s Perspective With 611 participants in the Ladies’ Event at this…
3. Win $2010 in Daily Prizes with Titan Poker “2010 New Year Promotion” TitanPoker.com is getting ready to celebrate the coming 2010…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

From the Department of Redundancy Department: Yesterday my local sports page featured not one but two editorials by regular columnists calling for Tiger Woods to tell the world what exactly happened during the wee hours of last Friday morning when he crashed his Escalade.

The op-eds ran side by side, both beginning on page one of the sports section, then continued together on page four. But it wasn’t one of those “you take one side, I’ll take the other” deals — no, both writers were making the same point, in almost the same terms.

Both mentioned how Woods named his yacht “Privacy.” Both brought up David Letterman as a counterexample of public confession. Both seized Woods’ statement that “This situation is my fault” (from his website) as opening the door to a wider range of possible behaviors or actions for which he might be culpable.

“There’s a difference in hiding something and choosing to keep it private,” concluded one. “Clearly, you’re hiding something here,” said the other, speaking directly to Woods. “Explain yourself. First, to the police. Then, to the public.”

More than a little presumptuous, really. Not to mention superfluous. I wondered if the writers had themselves been too private about what they’d chosen to write about for their columns yesterday — a little talk over the cubicles might’ve prevented our having to read the same message twice like that.

Of course, they weren’t the only ones making the same argument. Most of the media seems to have taken up an identical cause over the last day or two, seemingly devoting more attention to the Woods incident than to the news that 30,000 more troops are heading to Afghanistan. By doing so, they prove their own argument that the less Woods says, the more others will speculate about him.

You’ve probably picked up on my cynicism regarding it all by now, and indeed, I have no intention to provide any sort of “op-ed” (in either direction) on the topic. Instead, I’ll just make an observation about it all that is perhaps obvious to poker players. Some, anyway. The kind of thing that goes without saying. Namely…

The less you say, the more others will speculate about you.

In terms of poker news, we’ve kind of witnessed a version of this idea with the whole “Who Is Isildur1?” phenomenon of the last few weeks. But I’m referring more specifically to the frequently encountered situation at the tables wherein the player who refuses to give any extraneous information via speech or physical tells becomes increasingly provocative to others, especially if that player is winning and/or has otherwise demonstrated a proficiency with his or her play.

In the second volume of his Harrington on Cash Games, Dan Harrington includes a chapter on “Tells and Observations” in which he largely diminishes the importance of reading others’ physical tells (making note of betting patterns is more important, he argues), but does say that “controlling your own tells is ‘Job Number One.’”

Harrington offers some advice regarding how to go about revealing as little as possible about yourself, including describing what he calls “The Patrik Antonius Way.” Explains Harrington, the Finnish pro well exemplifies the “classically simple” method of information-hiding when “he just sits at the table, stiff as a board, and stares silently at a fixed point in space.”

If you think about it, these same sports writers have been heaping praise on Woods for years for what might be called his “classically simple” method of hiding (or keeping private) any extraneous information on the golf course — of being able to shut out all and incredibly maintain his famous “focus.” He’ll show emotion sometimes, sure, but there’s no disturbing him from that next shot. And that ability to focus disturbs his opponents.

Or it can, anyway. Many have noted the “Tiger Woods Effect” over the years, whereby other players play less well when partnered with him or even when playing in the same tournament. In fact, there was a scientific study published late last year by Jennifer Brown (a professor in Northwestern University’s Department of Marketing and Strategy) that attempted to quantify “the (adverse) incentive effects of competing with superstars” in which Woods was used as a primary example. Among other findings, Brown noted how in the tourneys she studied players averaged 0.8 strokes less per tournament when Woods was also playing.

Says Brown, “My calculations suggest that Woods’s PGA Tour earnings would have fallen from $48.1 million to $43.2 million between 1999 and 2006 had his competitors’ performance not suffered the superstar effect.” “Viewed in this light,” the effect of Woods’s mere presence in the field represents “is economically substantial,” she concludes.

Brown isn’t specifically referring to Woods’s ability to resist giving his opponents extraneous information while playing, but I think we can add his unwavering focus on the course to the list of qualities that unnerve his opponents, perhaps increasing the significance of that “superstar effect.”

Anyhow, now the superstar ain’t talking. And that’s causing everyone else to talk about him. Such a strategy works well — can even be “economically substantial” — at the poker table, or even on the golf course. But as the preponderance of these editorials suggests, I guess the “effect” is probably a little less desirable here.

Related posts:

1. World Series Of Poker Academy moves to Illinois for first event in Chicago The World Series of Poker Academy, the largest and…
2. US Open Odds: Tiger all the rage after Memorial triumph Woods the overwhelming favourite after second victory of comeback….
3. PGA Championship 2009 Betting Heats Up at Bodog.com All eyes are on Tiger Woods heading into the…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Was reading through the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition the other day. A lot that is worthwhile in there, I think.

In Howard Lederer’s chapter on limit hold’em tourneys (one of the few discussion of LHE tourneys you’ll find, actually), he brings up a concept regarding tournaments that I remember Mike Caro at one time making a lot of noise about. Kind of a curious idea (as most of Caro’s ideas are).

Early in the chapter, Lederer extols the virtues of making it to the cash — and in fact ultimately makes simply cashing a primary goal for tourney players, kind of countering what a lot of folks will say about the importance of winning or finishing near the top where one usually finds the big money. He admits that he might have won more money in his career overall if he’d adopted a looser, more aggressive approach, but for him that was “not a style I’m comfortable playing.” This business of approaching tourneys conservatively is not the concept I want to talk about, though.

Amid that discussion, Lederer offers the observation that when you cash in a tournament, but don’t finish first, “you have, by definition, taken advantage of the tournament structure.” Why? “Because you ended up broke — zero chips — but they paid you a big check anyway.”

It’s kind of an interesting point, I think — this idea that, as Lederer goes on to say, “the winner actually is the one that pays the biggest price for the tournament structure,” because “the winner gets all the chips but does not get all the money.”

Like I say, this is an idea that I first saw Mike Caro address as what he calls a “conceptual problem” with tournaments. In Caro’s discussion, he points back to the mid-1970s when tourneys stopped being “winner-take-all” affairs and the prize pools began to be distributed among several of the top finishers, not just the winner.

The history of the World Series of Poker Main Event exemplifies this trend. For the first eight years of the WSOP (1970-1977), the winner of the Main Event won the entire prize pool. When Doyle Brunson won his second title in ’77, there were 34 entrants in the event, each of whom paid $10,000 to play. That meant Brunson’s first prize was $340,000.

However, in 1978 the WSOP began to divide up the prize pool. There were 42 entrants that year, and Bobby Baldwin won. But he only got $210,000 for winning, and the other half of the money was divided among those finishing second, third, fourth, and fifth.

Another big change in the payout schedule at the WSOP Main Event happened in 1986, the year Berry Johnston won the WSOP. There were nearly the same number of players in the Main Event in ’86 (141) as there were the previous year (140). However, in 1985 only the top nine finishers cashed, while in 1986 the top 36 players cashed (although those finishing 28th-36th got less than their buy-in back — $7,500). So Johnston’s first prize of $570,000 was considerably less than the $700,000 Bill Smith got the year before for winning.

For Caro, this change created a “conceptual problem” with tournaments insofar as the way he views it, “first place is punished and all other close finishers are rewarded.” For the Mad Genius of Poker, this makes tournaments much, much less attractive to him, and in fact becomes a reason for him not even to play them. He goes on to suggest that “in terms of strategy… if you play to win first place… you’ll probably lose money in the long run.”

Because if you win you lose. Get it?

Caro thus offers the same advice as Lederer and insists “the way to make a profit in these tournaments is to survive” — that is, play conservatively, try to make the cash, and be satisfied with knowing that when you do cash (but do not finish first) you have taken advantage of the structure. Ever the iconoclast, Caro probably takes the whole idea a bit too far when he adds that “you should not go out of your way to win the first-place trophy, because the winner of the tournament is penalized.” (Here’s an article in which Caro explains his idea, if you’re interested.)

I’ve heard him made this argument in other contexts, and he usually insists that finishing second is really where it’s at. The guy finishing second is the one who makes the most money despite losing all of his chips.

Now I’m no mad genius. (In fact, I’ve been known to have trouble operating a cell phone.) But I think the point being made by Caro and Lederer actually depends on a particular view of the relationship between tournament chips and buy-ins — namely, a view that essentially sees tournament chips as directly representing the money one paid to enter the tournament. Which sort of makes sense when we talk about tournaments in a theoretical way, but creates a different “conceptual problem” (I think) once we sit down and start playing the actual tournament.

For example, there’s gonna be somewhere around 5,000 players entering that $1,000 no-limit hold’em “stimulus special” tournament (Event No. 4) this year. Let’s just say exactly 5,000 enter. All players will be receiving 3,000 chips, meaning, in a sense, that every chip cost them 33.33 cents.

Of course, since some of the prize pool is going to be taken out before the first hand is dealt, you could say the players will already be getting the worst of it just by entering the tournament. According to the WSOP, 7% of the prize pool is going to be withheld for entry fees, and another 3% taken for the tourney staff. With 5,000 players, that means there is going to be 15 million chips in play. Players will have paid $5 million total, but the prize pool is going to be $4.5 million after the juice. That means every chip is technically worth exactly 30 cents, even though players paid 33.33 cents per chip to play. If we view tournament chips as the equivalent of cash, every player is going to be down $100 just for entering the tournament.

Now I’m going to guess somewhere around 9% of the field is going to cash in this event (judging from the payout schedules of similar, big field events from the 2008 WSOP). That’s 480 players. Not sure what the prize will be for first place, but last year Grant Hinkle took a little over 15% of the prize pool for winning that first no-limit hold’em event — the one that had nearly 4,000 enter. So let’s say the winner of the $1,000 “stimulus special” gets 15% of the prize pool for winning — that’s $675,000. That means the other $3,825,000 will go to 479 players who finish with zero chips. If we think of tournament chips as cash, well, then it does appear that 479 of the 5,000 players entering are getting a pretty good deal here.

But really, once the entry fee is paid, that $1,000 each player handed over is long gone. All that’s left are the 3,000 chips waiting at the player’s seat at the start of Day 1. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense (to me) to think any longer of those chips bearing any relationship at all to the money spent for them, because you can’t go back and cash them in. Once the tourney starts, the trick is to turn those chips into more chips, and hopefully all of the chips. That’s the only way to maximize their value from that point.

I understand Caro’s lament about tourneys moving away from the “winner-take-all” format. And I even appreciate the “conceptual problems” that result, thus making him less inclined to play tournaments. But I don’t think I’m going to buy the conclusion that the winner of a tournament is in some sense the biggest loser, even if it is the case that he or she has won all the chips but is only claiming a small portion of the prize pool.

But that’s my choice, of course. I can buy what I want — chips, concepts — as long as I can afford to do so.

Many have noted before how poker is a game that tends to reveal certain aspects of a person’s character. Players play according to so many different styles because, well, people are different. They view the world differently. They view themselves differently. And poker helps to make all those differences much more conspicuous.

A person comes to the table with certain ideas. Meets a group of others, all of whom have their own way of understanding this mortal coil about which we individually wind. They’re all exposed to that chance element — the cards — and how they differently respond provides the foundation for the ensuing conflict of ideas. Eventually, each starts to understand how the others look at things, with some picking up on such more quickly than others.

Anthony Holden described the phenomenon in Big Deal (1990) as follows: “Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped bare at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life.”

Holden’s line gets quoted a lot, and while the leap from “loser in cards” to loser “in life” probably skips over a few necessary steps, it does nevertheless make a valid point. A big part of one’s success in poker has to do with seeing oneself as clearly and accurately as others do. You can’t win if others understand what you are doing better than you do. Which happens — to all of us when we first start to play poker, and to most of us even after we’ve been playing for a long while. We get lazy, we stop paying attention to ourselves, we stop paying attention to how others are seeing our “character stripped bare.” And when that happens, we lose. Usually.

Sorry to be so abstract here, but I’m getting to a sort of mini-epiphany I had over the last few days that concerns both my poker playing style and my character, generally speaking.

I am probably best classified as one of those “creatures of habit” types who generally has a hard time changing my routine once I find something that I like or at least is comfortable enough to endure without too much hardship. That’s not to say I am not able to adapt to changes that go on around me, but rather that I myself am less inclined to introduce such changes if not forced to do so.

This character trait gets illustrated in various ways, some relatively trivial, some not. For example, a less important manifestation of my resistance to change might be found in how I choose to negotiate my 25-mile commute to work. I take the same path every day, avoiding the interstate and its high-speed intensities and instead opting for the relatively tranquil state roads where I tool along at 45 per. After several years of construction, a new loop was added to the interstate several months ago that I have heard would cut a few minutes off of my commute, should I take it. But I haven’t even tried it. I’m just not interested.

A more meaningful example of my resistance to change would be that other path — the career one — that I chose a long time ago and have similarly stuck to for a good while now.

The poker writing has now become a not insignificant detour from that one for me, taking me to Las Vegas last summer to cover the WSOP, and allowing me to leave that same old, tedious main road for longer and longer stretches. I may well be going back to the WSOP this summer, and am starting to think more and more about whether or not I even want to return to the main road. Not quite ready to make that decision, but Vera and I have been talking more and more about the possibility of my doing so.

My resistance to change manifests itself in my poker playing, too — to my detriment, I’m afraid. For one, I tend to pick one game and stick to it in an almost obsessive (or superstitious) way, even though I know switching up would likely keep my poker instincts sharper in all games. I also tend to have a hard time moving around stakes-wise, especially if I’m extracting a modest win rate wherever I happen to be. Kind of limits my ever seeing what exactly I’m capable of doing, poker-wise.

The most harmful effect of resisting change at the poker table, though, is that others can “see” you much more quickly and clearly than they can otherwise. And, making matters worse, you tend not to pay attention to yourself, either. It’s easy in any game to turn predictable and make your patterns of raises, continuation bets, checks, and folds become blatantly apparent to others. Gotta be ready and willing to change it up, and often, since doing so increases your own understanding of yourself, and tends to decrease others’ understanding. And when that happens, you win. Usually.

Anyhow, one thing ain’t gonna change, and that is I’ll keep you updated here on all of the changes.