Ship It, Fish!

Jon Stewart said a few nights ago (just catching up) in a bit about how Texas puts its name on everything: "Texas Hold'em? There are no other Hold'ems".
Of course, poker players cringe to hear that because Omaha is actually Omaha Hold'em.
OTOH, most poker players call Texas Hold'em by just the name "Hold'em" and Omaha Hold'em by the name "Omaha".
So I guess he has a point: the texas variety owns the name a bit.
What really bugs me is people who say they play "no limit", as if NL HE and Limit HE are the only two games that exist. ;)

It shows how completely out of the loop I am in the poker world that I just read, paging through a September 2008 issue of Card Player I still had sitting around my apartment, that Mohegan Sun reopened its poker room back in August 2008. Teh Internets tell me that it was announced a year ago, and I completely missed it.

I don't live in New England anymore, but I would have stopped to see what it was like on a recent trip there. But, when you are out of the loop, and you only listen podcasts to keep up with poker, and all those podcasts are USA west coast based, it's not surprising that you'd miss the news.

The Mohegan Sun poker room has a strange oral history. I started playing regularly at Foxwoods just a few weeks after the Mohegan Sun poker room closed in the early 2000's. In fact, I quickly learned to hustle a very profitable prop bet at the $2/$4 Limit HE tables that I frequented in those days. When I sat down at a table, I'd pick someone who was clearly not a regular and say privately to him: I bet you $20 that within thirty minutes, someone at this table will mention Mohegan Sun's poker room.. The newbie would usually say, they don't have poker! Ok, I'll take the bet. I think I made a couple $100 on this one. For at least a year, the closing was the constant topic of conversation at most Foxwoods tables.

Silly rumors always abounded at the Foxwoods tables about why Mohegan Sun poker closed. The most common two were that the poker room manger was dealing drugs or running a prostitution ring from the room. No one ever had any evidence of this. The publicly stated reason, actually, was probably the most true one: slot machines are more dollar per square foot profit for a casino.

Of course, this was pre-poker boom. Thus, casino managers saw poker as a whimsy and not particularly valuable as a draw. I've always believed the hidden numbers in the fact that most people don't go to casinos alone, and therefore some in the group will play poker and others will play slots and table games. But, you can't really measure this, so poker was out and slots were in. Mohegan Sun insisted to stick to its silly plan as the Foxwoods poker room grew and grew.

However, the worst impact this had was on Foxwoods poker itself. I saw the Foxwoods poker room that I first visited turn from the really great poker room to the mediocrity that comes from monopoly. With complete control of the (legal) New England poker market, Foxwoods was able to instantiate player-unfriendly policies and rules and know that they still wouldn't lose the players.

When NL HE started, these rules reached their annoying peak. Here's a run-down of various early Foxwoods NL HE small-stakes policies: $5/half time charges at $1/$2 NL HE with a $40 minimum and $100 maximum. You could buy in for $40, tip the dealer, and immediately rebuy for the $100 max, so, if you knew the trick, the max buy was actually $139 with a $1 surcharge. (I usually paid the BB with $40, folded if moving in for the $38 wasn't profitable, and took the SB with a $138 stack.) Even with the annoying buying limits, it was against the rules to pay the $5/half time charge from your pocket; it had to come from your stack. People who doubled up a few times would call floor on people who tried to pay time from the pockets, and floor would back them up.

Eventually, the one great thing about Foxwoods NL HE disappeared before I was playing big enough to take advantage: the $5/$5 $500-min no-cap-buy-in $6/half time charge game, which had typical stack sizes of around $2,000 (i.e., very deep $5/$5). A regular in the game, who often sat with $10k and busted people for a living, told me in 2002 it was the juiciest NL HE game in the world. Foxwoods always remained the place for lots of Stud games, since the closing of Mohegan Sun took away all other serious Stud action at the middle limits on the east coast, but that was about all it had left in the “worthwhile” column after a while.

Mohegan Sun, for its part, stupidly missed the entire poker boom, and opened their room only after the boom's decline was well underway. Poker is now more popular (and likely profitable for casinos) than it was in the 1990s, but the heyday has long past. Nevertheless, I'm glad to hear that New England is finally free of the poker monopoly, and I look forward to stopping at Mohegan Sun on my next trip through Connecticut.

I rarely post nor play anymore, as you all know, but I do go on a poker excursion once every few months. While I haven't been bothering to post reports or anything from them, I can't let this one pass since at a 2-3-5 $1k max NL HE table at Lucky Chances, who joins our table but a software-related professional (this is the Bay area after all) and sometimes poker pro. Not only that, but he is also an LJ-er named dmorr and he posted about a hand that we played. I have commented.

I should also note he LJ-outed me with my real name and employment affiliation, but I guess I should stop worrying about this now that I've talked about my part-time professional poker period on Free Software related podcasts and because my Wikipedia entry at one time linked to this journal. Only a moron couldn't figure out my real name if they gave it ten minutes of net.work.

I never got around to posting, but I did my “something from nothing” experiment for the first part of this year. I got $1,200 on Cake by using Cake Points (Gold Chips), Gold Card bonuses, and the pennies left in my account. I had moved up to $0.25/$0.50 NL HE and was seeing how far I could get. Then epassporte closed up shop. Cake is now using some sketchy cashout mechanism (they ask participants not to identify which payment processor they are using publicly for fear they will get shut down. Funny!). So, I decided today to try to take the $1,200 and give up. I have 20 GC's left; maybe I'll see if I can turn that into something.

I also have a ton of UB points too. I did use those to win my wife an Ipod and also entered a few tourneys. I worked it up to about $30 but proceeded to go broke by playing to high. I think I have $6.50 left there, plus about 25,000 UB points..

I didn't do my annual tax post for my 2007 results on April 15th. I'll have to post it later. I did have a huge tax bill because of all the Cake money I made early on in 2007.

During the weeks leading up to the WSoP this year, I played lots of satellites with points and various other small amounts. This is a tourney hand from an online WSoP main event $600+35 satellite (which I'd super'ed into). Starting chips were 2,500 and starting blinds were 10/20. We were on the first blind level, at a 9-handed table. I had 2,800 in chips and was two from the button.

Action is folded to the person on my right, who made it 60. I called with 5 5. The big blind (with 2,959 chips) defended and we saw the flop of 5 2 6 three-handed with 190 in the pot.

It was checked to me, and I led for 100 chips. The big blind called and the preflop raiser folded. The pot stood at 390 chips. I knew nothing about the players, but I put the big blind on an overpair (probably around 77 or 88 that he was misplaying), 34, 66, 22, 78, 45, 47, or maybe overcards. The turn was the Q and he led for 200 chips. I somewhat felt perhaps he did have something like AQ that he check-called with and added this to his range. I also though maybe at this point he had a gutshot or overcards on the flop and picked up a flush draw. The annoying part about his lead is that it actually increased my range for him (even if it did make it unlikely he held an overpair on the flop).

I made it 600 chips to go and he called quickly. We saw the river of J with 1,590 chips in the pot. He had only 1,699 chips remaining. I really felt he had a set of 2's at this point, but obviously 34 and a set of sixes were real possibilities. I consider that maybe some sort of Q was a possibility, as he may have been making some sort of delayed steal on the flop. I decided there were a number of hands he could pay off legitimately. I figured he'd call with everything in his range except busted-straights/turned-flush-draws. I led 800.

He check-raised all in. At that point, I narrowed his range to 34, 66, 22, and very rarely QJ. I called his last 899 with 1-to-3.54 odds, hoping for 22, and saw 3 4.

After calling the river, I felt strongly I shouldn't have tried that river value bet. I think I would have been more likely to check in a cash game, but in a tourney (at the time) I felt I had to collect the chips. Once I've value-bet, I clearly can't fold to the check-raise because I can't completely eliminate 22. Plus, if he had QJ even a little bit of the time I think the odds are clearly right.

Thoughts?

I have been talking about safety issues, busts and robberies for quite a while. I decided to quit playing at NYC clubs over a year ago due primarily to safety issues. It seems my read was right.

I've always felt that robberies were more dangerous than busts. I've also mentioned to many that fear of a young guy making a mistake or getting nervous with a gun would be the biggest threat.

Seems I was right about that too, after last night. There have been a number of stories, of which this seems the most accurate and detailed, and this one is not bad. (Update: This story is much better than the others.) There is also a long 2+2 thread now, that started just an hour and half after the incident.

For those who don't want to chase links: another robbery at a club on 28th street and 5th Avenue has occurred and resulted in our first NYC poker death, due to an apparently accidentally fired gun of a robber.

There is no game juicy enough to risk your life, even if it's a thousand to one shot that you'll get killed. I've played enough poker to find that thousand to ones come in every once in a while and you just have to avoid the situation when you are gambling with your life.

I hope this will help the effort to get legal poker at the Aqueduct race track. For the meantime, I'm glad I left the NYC poker scene when I did.

Update: Newer stories are saying this club was run by the Straddle Club team. Like almost everyone who has run a club in this city, they've always were pretty bad at their business; it's in some ways no surprise it was their club — again. But, frankly, any place that runs a game with less than a $10k buy-in probably simply isn't safe, no matter what.

Another Update: There is a New York Times story now.

An old poker friend from Boston noted in my journal how he and a few others got online during the PPV main event WSoP 2006 and watched it — commenting on hands and plays — until the sun came up while I tried to “live blog” it. It seems sometimes like the whole poker world has changed around me in the last year, and then I realize that it probably hasn't — mostly, I've changed and it makes the minor changes in the poker world seem more pronounced.

The slow decline of online poker (UIGEA impacting some and not others) still seems to cause some attrition, but I hear that NYC clubs keep reopening after busts and (even worse) robberies, and there is some good action around. I've lost the stomach for it after hearing a local from my home game recount his tale of hiding under the table with his hands up, emptying his pockets for a guy with a gun. I can live without that being a risk in my life.

I still want to run the home game, but I've been so engaged in my job that I can't easily commit the entire weekend day (the morning to set up and clean a bit, the rest of the day to play) at the moment. I'm hoping for September but October seems the more likely now.

At times, I miss poker. I miss the completely engrossing distraction, especially when I have challenges at work that require careful thought and concentration that I sometimes want a break from. I don't miss the beats, the struggling, the constant push of every edge and never being able to give up.

I made two brief casino trips this summer; my hope is I'll put time aside soon to do reviews of the places and post them here an on twoplustwo.

Televised poker is somewhat horrible now. I look forward to the return of High Stakes Poker, as the tournament clip shows are just too boring for anything but background noise while I work.

Oh, and back to where I started this post: I really enjoyed the final table this year. Watching Yang do his thing (and the downright goofy out-loud prayers at all-in moments) was a lot of fun. He's obviously inexperienced, but he has pretty reasonable poker instincts and he's clearly a kind and caring person (unlike the (frankly) downright slimy Mr. Gold). W.D. came over for about half the PPV airing and we had a good time.

Poker, in the end, if a fun hobby when I'm giving it only passing attention, but I don't want to “live” it. I'm pretty sure I can find better things to do.

[BTW, an odd thread sparked by an out-of-the-blue anonymous commentor on a year old post has started. Amazing how google-reachable old journal entries can bring out the crazies from time to time.]

This is my fourth and final post in my series about why I've reduced my poker time to only two or three hours a week, and why I likely won't be pursuing it even as a part-time pro in 2008.

Some people have a view that the point of life is simply to “have fun” or the “pursuit of happiness”. I have a number of friends — most notably W.D. — who hold this theory of life quite strongly.

Despite many debates with them, I simply don't believe this. I believe that human beings have an inherent obligation to make a life-long contribution to society. Perhaps I read too much Kant in college, but the fact remains that my fundamental philosophical life focus goes back almost completely to a single line in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals I read on the bed of my dorm room my sophomore year: take every action, as if, by acting, that action were willed into universal law.

I realize that many modern philosophers reject Kant as overly simplistic and meaninglessly formalized. I know that some of Kant's work is sophistry to justify Catholic dogma that I've personally rejected. However, I ultimately remain compelled by this concept.

Frankly, I can only justify time spent doing something as frivolous as poker to the extent to which it clears my head from my day job which is focused on improving the world. When I talked about poker not being about the money, I discussed how I got deep into poker as an escape during a burn-out period in my life's mission. That burn-out is over, so I must again focus on it.

I do second-guess this philosophy at times. Once, a player that I met in Boston — a predatory businessman type — told me that he needed to play poker because it fed his preternatural instincts to be the alpha male and destroy his competition. I rejected his concept at the time, because he was generally opposed to causes to help others. Such motivations were deeply focused on his own success in a disgustingly Randian sort-of way.

However, years later, a dear friend of mine, who lives and works every day in the same world-saving movement where I do (and has been in it for even longer), told me something similar, saying: you and I need to play poker to feed our baser instincts since we spend our days focused on helping other people. I took this seriously, because this fellow is one of the people I respect most in the world, and, unlike that other fellow, this guy has the credentials of being someone who spends his days trying to make the world a better place.

So, maybe this “feed your demon” theory of poker is true. Maybe it is the case that poker serves to compartmentalize this kind of competitive focus for everyone. I've always been someone obsessed with competing with himself — comparing my own new results to my old ones and deciding whether or not I've done better. I always try to avoid lining my own accomplishments up against others'. Regardless, even if this theory is true, I still think I want poker to be a passing occasional activity in my life rather than a deep focus. If I have this competitive need, which I somewhat doubt is that strong (even if it exists at all), I am sure it can be served with an occasional game of poker rather than the near constant one I was in from 2002 until early 2007.

With just 24 days to go before banks are required to comply with the UIGEA, I was greeted with this unfortunate message when I went to cash out my daily $300 from ePassporte today:

US Bank Account

This functionality is temporarily disabled. Our backend ACH processor is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please check back later.

I wonder if technical difficulties mean, our USA processor just bumped us to comply with UIGEA and we're scrambling to find another. I have about $2,000 left of the large sum I've been pulling out at $300/day for quite a while, I hope I can get the rest out. I also have a dozen $300 withdraws in the “pipeline” that have left my ePassporte account but haven't shown up in my bank account.

Ok, so now would be the panic time. Online poker is about to collapse in the USA. Get your money out now. :)

Update: ePassporte is working again, for now. Still, less than a month left before full-on UIGEA.

I had built a list of reasons that I'm winding down playing of poker. I mostly wrote them out for myself, and had planed to make proper entries and post them here. As you might guess, because my decision was more or less made that I'd wind down my poker efforts, I have been slow to roll out the posts that explore the reasons.

I've been listing the reasons in no particular order; the first I posted was regarding game selection concerns. The second is a bit more nuanced, and I'll begin explaining it by telling a brief story.

A long time ago, I was introduced to someone whom I'd been told was an avid poker player. I asked her what she liked about poker and her quick answer was: I love poker because I love money. I was taken aback. I then made my usual mistake when I'm well informed on a subject: rather than keeping my judgements appropriately to myself, I blurted out an analysis: You'll never be a good poker player if you love money that much.

Of course, this is a counter-intuitive assessment, but nonetheless correct. I first encountered this idea when reading Doyle Brunson, who has said in many fora: to be a successful poker player, you must have a complete disregard for money (or sometimes saying the value of money). Eventually I came to the realization that this was a big factor in my (albeit small-time) poker success as well.

The fact is, I never much cared about money. I have been extremely poor at times (well, “extremely” when consider in relation to my social class, upbringing, and education level — I make no assertions that at my poorest I'm always have it better than most people in the world; we don't actually live in a classless society). At times when I was “poor”, I (like anyone else would) noticed the lack of money to do basic things like rent an apartment without cockroaches, or to have enough money to afford real pasta sauce rather than buying tomato paste and adding water.

But once I had enough money that I could rent a relatively nice apartment, eat out when I wanted to, and own a nice computer (or, have my employers provide them, actually), there wasn't much left that I ever needed. I just never wanted things. I really always hated possessions. I'm known for hording junk because I hate throwing things away, but I found I was just as happy avoiding acquiring things.

When I started playing poker, it was mainly as a competitive effort with the side-effect of getting free pizza money while in college. When I started playing seriously in the early 2000's, it was as an escape of my “regular community” that I had temporarily become fed up with. But, it was never really about the money.

Money to me always seemed like a meaningless thing. In the late 1990s, while my friends ran off to cash in on the Dot.Com boom, I went back to graduate school to hide from what I saw as over-commercialization of the Internet that I loved. Now, I'm staunchly middle class, I've been lucky to get jobs that don't compromise my principles, and it probably will stay this way for the rest of my life. There's nothing I want in my life that a little more money can buy. I can imagine it would be nice to win so-called “life-changing money”, so that I wouldn't have to ask people to pay me to work on the social causes that I care about. (I'm one of these rare people who would do roughly the same job I do now even if I didn't need the money.) However, making money that doesn't instantly make me independently wealthy simply won't improve my life. I just don't have much interest in being a Ferengi.

I feel that I got into trouble when I started to think about poker as something I needed to do to make expenses. I did increase my expense footprint, and it will require some careful financial management to live without the $1,000/month I was pulling from poker. But I can surely figure out how to reduce my expenses enough to make things work.

But, that's somewhat beside the point. The point is that I didn't get into poker for the money. I did, however, get caught up in the poker boom (ironically, after I'd already explicitly avoided the Dot.Com boom). I'd started to like the fact that easy money was coming my way; I was becoming a little bit a Ferengi. But, that's not something I really wanted; I pretended I wanted it, in a way, to justify not giving up, and after a while I even believed that I wanted it. In other words, I convinced myself I wanted “easy money” to keep from throwing myself into something I valued more. I bought into the myth of EV, which assumes a person's time is only valuable to the extent to which that person produces wealth. I do believe in EV in the mathematical abstract. Yet, the quality of life EV, and the EV of world betterment, are both much more important in the equation than the pure financial EV. This belief is why I refused to take Economics in college; it's why I avoided going to work for a start-up. It's just not worth changing my core principles just to keep playing poker.

In the final analysis, I was using poker as a mechanism to avoid spending as much time in the world I really loved (the one to which my career is devoted), because I was a bit burned out, as many who devote their lives to social causes do. I'm not burned out anymore, and in such a situation, poker serves only as a financial EV calculation. Yet, as I told that avid poker player I once met: one can't possibly be good at poker anyway if it's only about the money. The people who do best at poker love the game — they want to be doing nothing else when they are playing poker. I stopped feeling that months and months ago. It just became about the money. But, no matter what my financial EV is, I can't really justify playing for only that, particularly when I know I'm not going to get financially independent from it.