shipitfish | GSN High Stakes Poker Thoughts

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GSN High Stakes Poker Thoughts

I saw two interesting things on GSN's High Stakes Poker the past two weeks.

First, on last week's episode, Jerry Buss went broke and asked for a loan from Daniel Negreanu. This itself wasn't all that surprising; that's typical of what I know about low, middle and high stakes poker. What was strange was that Daniel took it right from his stack. I have been taught many times that one can't take money off the table, especially to loan to another player. I assume no one complained here for a few reasons:

Daniel had the whole table covered anyway, and still did after loaning money to Jerry.
They want Jerry to stay in the game because his money is tight-weak dead money.

Still, it seems strange that the impact on cross-table loans in poker and NL HE in particular wasn't discussed at all.

Second, while Sammy Farha is not that popular among most, I saw him do a pretty honorable poker act in this week's episode. In the final hand of the night, which was prophetically AA vs. KK, Sammy holding KK asked Barry Grenstein if he wanted to run it twice. Of course, Barry said no. Then, when Sammy flopped a K and became the favorite again, he offered to run it twice from that point too. That's pretty nice of him, given Barry didn't give him the same chance when he was a favorite.

Of course, Sammy knew that Barry was likely to refuse, since it would look just awful for Barry to say no preflop, but yes once he was a huge underdog. So, it's basically a psychological free-roll for Sammy to make the offer. But it seemed really nice, anyway, on the surface.

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I haven't been watching much poker on TV in the past year or so, but I've been tivoing HSP on GSN because it's such a great show.

I suspect that nobody complains about loaning from their stack in the ultra-high no max games. To do so would be to claim that the loaner was trying to stash away part of his/her winnings. But it seems that all those players would be beyond such tactics. And in the cases where a player was so bad that he/she wasn't, they probably wouldn't tap on the glass anyway.

I also found Sammy's offer to go twice after the K spiked curious. A friend of mine commented that although it was nice, it also probably felt pretty good to say "okay, how about now?". Essentially, taken from a different angle, the offer was rude, not nice. "Oh yeah big shot? I bet you're wishing we ran it twice now."

I felt soooooo bad for Barry on that hand. The poor bastard must have been so excited to have AA vs KK and to have a K on the flop was just devastating. I mean... 82% favored to a 4% (?) chance is just awful. Of course, in typical Barry fashion, he was as calm as if he just ordered a cup of coffee or something. My theory is that he goes home, hits the bottle, the dog and the wife before he hits the sack. Nobody can be that emotionless without medication. Ooh... I wonder if you can take mood stabilizers and still make good poker decisions... Maybe I should talk to my doctor buddy about that :)

T

I think preflop that you're only a 20% dog a better pair. Also by having his pair so close to Barry's Aces he's in a little bit of better shape since he takes two cards away from a straight draw for Barry. It's a slight difference if Sammy had sevens. He'd be a little bit more of an underdog, maybe one percent or less.

The four percent pair over pair is with just one card to come. When calculating percent chance of winning I use this estimate outs times two plus one. If it was AA vs KK on the turn and Sammy was drawing to one of two kings, it's be a 2*2+1 = 5% chance of winning.

Actually it's better for the underpair if it's further away from the overpair. The underpair needs to suck out, so it benefits more from having the straights unblocked.

KK vs. AA is 17.8% if you average all the different suit combos. 77 vs. AA is 19.4%.

If you're a fan of BG you should pick up his book, An Ace on the River. Very good read, you really get to learn how he sees his life as a popker pro.

I'm actually not a fan of his book. Some nice photos, but that's about it.

As someone says in another comment thread, Barry has a huge bankroll. He probably just doesn't care. To him, it's a very good business investment that didn't work out. You go home and think, well, I made good decisions, and it didn't work out. For me, losing $1,000 in one session used to make me feel just terrible. Now, I can lose that much, and not be upset at all, as long as I can confirm by analysis that I made the right decisions. I can certainly see how, once you've gotten to Barry's level, losing hundreds of thousands is no problem either.

When high-stakes tool swingers deal it twice, I think they deal out two boards (or partial boards) side by side, without reshuffling. I'm not positive they don't reshuffle, but that's my understanding based on what the High Stakes Poker announcers said and based on what I've read elsewhere.

After discussing this with a friend and running some numbers, I'm pretty sure this changes the odds in a way hurts the guy who's behind. If there's only one card to come, the odds are unchanged, but with two or more cards to come, the underdog's ev decreases.

The basic idea is that if you deal it twice with reshuffling, the ev has to be the same as for a normal 1x deal.
But if you don't reshuffle, it's harder for the underdog to scoop than in the 2x-reshuffled scenario because once he wins one sub-deal, some of his outs are gone from the stub; the extreme case is a one-outer like KK vs. 77 on a K77 flop, where KK can never scoop. Yes, the underdog has a higher chance of getting 1/2 when it's not reshuffled, but that doesn't compensate for his reduced scooping chances.

Maybe Barry and Farha were being polite gentlemen. Or maybe they know about this concept and were being dirty bloodthirsty sharks. Barry has said before, though, that he always declines to run it twice because his bankroll is huge and he doesn't care about the swings, whereas his opponents might care and losses might tilt them. So either Barry doesn't know this concept or he's being cagey.

i've never heard of reshuffling when running it multiple times.

Ok, thanks. I didn't mean to suggest the pros were doing it weird; I really have no experience with this. I just went off on unshuffled vs. shuffled because it's easier to think about than unshuffled vs. running it once, and shuffled is definitely the same as running it once.

Whoa, I guess that intuitive comparison in the K77 example isn't so intuitive after all. When I do the math on that, it says KK wins twice as much if he runs it twice instead of once! But in situations where the underdog has more outs, running it multiple times seems to hurt rather than help him (because he burns up outs when he hits twice in the same deal?).

I'll report back when I've worked out more examples and double-checked the math. Maybe I'm just stoned and unable to multiply correctly.

Ok, I have looked at several situations and triple-checked all math. I was flat wrong; dealing it twice without reshuffling is the same as dealing once.

Sorry for the noise!

No problem at all. Could you post the detailed math if you get a chance?

Here is the EV of dealing it twice, that I think everyone wants to know but is too lazy to work out. When you deal twice, you do not change the expected value! Let's say that two players are all-in on the turn, and only the river card remains. Let's say that player A wins with 13 of the remaining 43 cards, and player B wins with 30 of them. So the EV of player A dealing it once is (+13-30)/43 = -17/43*1. The EV with dealing it twice is (the chance of winning it twice)*payoff + (chance of winning once, losing once)*payoff, and (chance of losing twice)*payoff.
winning twice:
13/43*12/42 * 1 +
one lose, one win
(13/43*30/42 + 30/43*13/42)*0 +
two losses
30/43*29/42 * -1
= (156 - 870)/(43*42) = -714/(43*42) = -17/43
So the "scoop the pot" theory is BS, since although you decrease your odds of scooping, you also decrease your odds of losing both by the same amount. So definitively, only the variance is changed, not the EV. There's the math to prove it! But then again maybe I'm stoned and made a mistake :)
Jojo Mcbean
www.wikipollo.com

I seriosuly doubt they reshuffle. I'd say they "don't," for sure, but I'm running super-bad right now and i can't be sure of anything.

Hey Bradley, it is Woolf. No one minded Jerry taking the loan from DN's stack because none one them are playing with their own money from what I understand. They are also getting paid 1200/hr to sit there. It is for show and not for real "high stakes" poker.

I figured they were paid-to-play from the television producers, but do you really think it wasn't their own money? I have a hard time believing it is that much of a fraud. BTW, do sign up for an LJ account if you want post in the journal more often; that way, I don't have to approve the comment.

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GSN High Stakes Poker Thoughts

I like that show

that was the worst

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dealing it twice

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"Maybe I'm just stoned and unable to multiply correctly."

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no subject

Jerry's loan

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card driver