GSN High Stakes Poker Thoughts

[shipitfish]

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.

Comments

that was the worst

[tmckearney.livejournal.com]

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

Re: that was the worst

[patty-bush.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: that was the worst

[dkwad.livejournal.com]

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%.

Re: that was the worst

[patty-bush.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: that was the worst

[(Anonymous)]

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

Re: that was the worst

[shipitfish.livejournal.com]

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.