There is a Poker Players' Alliance call-in to the USA Senate today until 17:30 Eastern. They set up an automated 800 line that auto-forwards you to one of your senators based on your zip code. The line is flooded right now, so calling your senator directly might be better at the moment.

I'm more the faxing type; that's the way I've always chosen to write to my legislative representatives. Below is what I wrote to my New York Senators. Feel free to cut and paste at will if you want to fax them. You can probably dig up fax numbers on the senate.gov site.

Dear Ms. Clinton [ and Mr. Schumer],

I am a new resident of New York state; I moved here only one year ago, so it is my first time contacting you.

I am writing to urge you to oppose legislation that would make online poker and other poker-related activities illegal. I know that there is at least one bill of this nature that might be before the Senate this term.

The game of poker is an American tradition dating back to the civil war era, and perhaps earlier. Mark Twain considered it so important to America's culture that he proclaimed that a man who didn't know the “meaning of a ‘flush’” was “enough to make one ashamed of one's species”. Many famous presidents, such as Truman and Nixon, were known for their love of the game. Truman even played it on the way home from Potsdam with the journalists and staffers with him to help ease his mind as he made the key American decisions of the end of World War II. To make poker illegal would deny our own game-playing heritage.

Poker is unlike other so-called “gambling” activities that Congress seeks to outlaw. Poker is indeed played with cards for money, but it is a game of skill, not chance. It is much more like chess than it is like lotteries. Meanwhile, I find it incredibly hypocritical that legislation under consideration carves out special permission for state lotteries, which can be defined no other way than “pure gambling”. No credible reason is given for allowing these wagering activities, while a traditional and quintessentially American game of skill that includes wagering is declared illegal online.

I hope that you will vehemently oppose this legislation on the behalf of me and all New York poker players. As a New York City resident, I have witnessed first-hand a recent backlash and crackdown against those who enjoy a friendly game of poker here in this great city. Poker players and those who make venues available for us to play are currently treated as if we were criminals, while those who run seedy off-track betting establishments are given an endorsement in the law.

I hope you see this hypocrisy and pandering for what it is. Please, don't let it extend any further for New Yorkers than it already has. Oppose all legislation that would make poker illegal. Instead, support plans that would regulate and tax poker for the benefit of the general good, much like those lotteries that are already endorsed by our government. Prohibition has never worked to prevent activities that certain parties dislike; let's instead find ways to build a tax revenue base from this activity that some misguided politicians find “immoral”.

Sincerely,

Bradley Sif

Having been at a home game recently where we tried to play NL and PL games with a cap and it just confused everyone, I was somewhat glad to see that Full Tilt Poker is now offering capped NL and PL games. Perhaps it will increase the general knowledge and understanding in the poker world about what a cap is.

I haven't totally thought through the implications of this, but I wonder if I could use this feature to play in somewhat higher games than I normally do. It seems their $1/$2 NL HE games have a $60 cap, which means I could feel quite comfortable as high as $3/$6 NL HE game with a $180 cap. I also wonder what types of players these cap games will attract. Will the real fish stay at the regular games, or will they like the idea of a cap which will allow them to overplay things like top pair and overpairs? I am really curious to find out; I guess I'll have to get bought back into Full Tilt and see what the deal is.

Finally, I am pretty sure that cap games are really important for the future of poker. Limit poker was invented, in part, because people went broke too fast playing real table-stakes NL and PL poker games. The money and interest in NL HE, for example, dried up completely in the late 1980s and by the mid-1990s, limit poker was all everyone played.

I'd hate to see this happen again as people start to go seriously broke playing NL HE. Cap games may be the way to compromise between the two so we aren't all left with limit poker as the only option for juice games in a few years. History does, sometimes, repeat itself.

A better headline would probably be Idiots Do Stupid Things to Make Poker Look Bad. We're at that special time in the development of a cultural phenomenon on the cusp of permanent mainstream-dom when things like this can really hurt us. I link to it only because no one who is likely to get the story covered in the mainstream press reads my blog. :)

We need people out there speaking for poker who are reasonable, well-reasoned poker. What we're getting is confusing associations with other forms of gambling (yes, sports betting is a skill too, but we have to do this one fight at a time), and the badness of Jamie Gold's financial dispute.

It's unfortunate that people are getting themselves killed in relation to poker, but it's a lot fewer than died from alcohol-related incidents in the last two weeks. For some people, an innocent thing becomes a bad vice. We can't solve the problems by prohibition on any of it.

Ok, I sound more libertarian than liberal at the moment, so I better stop. :)

BTW, there may be good news, no one I know can actually confirm the closing of the NYC club that I mentioned earlier. Apparently, they have a new phone number and are still going. Phew.

In his highly acclaimed comedy performance, Dress to Kill, Eddie Izzard points out that the Church of England has no fundamentalists, because they simply aren't that far into the religious aspects of life. He argues that the most radical of questions a C of E fundamentalist would ever come up with would be Tea and Cake, or Death, and Izzard comically points out how easy of a question Cake, or Death? would be to answer, should one of these C of E fundamentalists ever approach you.

I got a question today from a poker fundamentalist on an old blog entry. My first thought was of Izzard's comedic Cake or Death sketch. Someone sitting in a hotel, asked me, Do you suck [at poker], or lie [about your winnings]?.

So, should I take suck or lie? Izzard's point, of course, about these fundamentalists is that single-minded thinking, where the options are narrowed to two ludicrous paths, are exactly where single-minded religious focus falls into the absurd. I think this fellow has done the same.

Of course, there are many players out there, even playing at my stakes, making a hell of a lot more than I am (at least in the short term). Poker games are really juicy right now, and lots of new players have done well early, through a combination of luck and some basic skill. I believe that over time, the luck is going to even out for those players who are beating these games for more than the statically expected.

Regardless, I take every poker criticism, however ludicrous it seems on the surface, very seriously. I therefore don't want to dismiss the possibility that I suck or lie; someone has made the case, so I will attempt to figure out if he's right. Checking whether I am lying is pretty easy; I simply am not. I don't plan to prove that to Mr. Hotel with scanned images of my bank records. My readers will just have to assume that for sake of argument that I am not lying and my results are as I say they are. Why would I draw the IRS' attention by ranting about how I pay my taxes on poker winnings if I wasn't paying them in full?

So, let's dig deeper into those results to see if I suck. I generally can eek out about .7 big bets per hour (or per 100 hands) in limit (I'm frankly not that great of a limit player), and I can pull down 5-7 big binds per hour (or per 100 hands) in NL games. In the really soft games, I find that I can reach that 7 big blind level pretty frequently, and when the games are a bit tougher, I struggle to stay at the 5 level.

I have looked at years of results — online databases of hands and session records from live play — and I don't think I'm that far from the theoretical expected maximums. I do figure I could get myself to a 1.5 big bet winner in the limit games with serious work, but until NL and PL structures actually start to completely fizzle out, I'm going to hold off into putting serious work into my limit game. I probably do suck more than I should at limit, but that's been a known problem in my game for quite some time and don't think I'm likely to improve it. I had two choices: work on my limit game, or focus on NL/PL, and I've chosen the latter. I argue this isn't “sucking”, it's picking a specific area of focus and holding off improving another area that isn't all that popular at the moment, anyway. In other words, I've made a game selection decision that I'd be better off improving my NL and PL game for the moment.

Another idea I had to investigate the possible source of the comment was, instead of looking at my average results based on that session data, that I would take the numbers backwards instead. In other words, let's investigate if making around $10,000 a year fits with a reasonable amount of EV, given how often I play. Ok, so for sake of simplicity, let's figure I made exactly $10,000 and I played only $1/$2 NL and made that average of six big blinds per hour. That means that I would have played 833.33 hours in a year, or about 16 hours each week. On average, this is exactly how much I am playing. Some weeks I don't have time to play at all on the weekdays. Those days, I play about 8 hours a day each of Saturday and Sunday. On weeks when I've put in a few hours during the weekday evenings, I usually put in less on the weekends. Anyway, I have to note that I was truly amazed that the numbers, which I hadn't looked at in this “top down” way ever before, actually matched perfectly to the EV numbers I calculated using other data sets. It's not mere mathematical symmetry, because my banking records which I use to generate my tax data and that $10k number are completely separate records from the session data I used to generate the average win rate numbers.

Of course, if we do the numbers from a limit perspective (I did play some limit in 2004 and 2005), it comes out to about 18 hours a week of half $5/$10, half $10/$20 (i.e., the theoretical limit of $7.50/$15). Again, the numbers match my actual playing frequency.

Anyway, this troller has given me two options (suck or lie?), neither of which makes much sense given the data. Sure, I'm not the best player I could be. I suppose there must be players out there who have reached a pinnacle of 3 big bets per hour in limit and 12 big blinds per hour in NL. However, I may be well on my way, because my results show a steady climb (when I first started NL, I was lucky to stay even over time and I was certainly net loser in the early River Street days). Of course, my game needs work (everyone's really does), but wouldn't the first step in such work involve being honest about one's results? And if you are honest about your results, how can you suck? To really suck at poker, you have to be someone who is unwilling to be honest with yourself about your game.

I think that newcomers to poker are far too optimistic about what is possible with regard to wins. I know a lot of young kids who have had amazing runs, and they have moved up in stakes quickly. I heard about one young boy who has put together a $30,000 bankroll in the matter of just about a year (having started at $1/$2 NL), and he frequently sits in $100/$200 NL games with his whole bankroll on the table. Sure, he's winning now and may win for a while, but the odds say that a crash and burn is coming unless he gets realistic.

Meanwhile, I have friends asking me why I'm still usually playing $1/$2 NL after all these years and only occasionally taking shots at bigger games. It's true that I keep very conservative bankroll requirements (having gone broke twice, once for having inadequate bankroll and once for raiding it for other expenses). I simply don't believe I have a reasonable bankroll for bigger games. Meanwhile, I've chosen this year to take some profit from poker, so my bankroll, for most of this year, has been at static size; my winnings each month leave it steadily for other expenses.

I'm a winning player who constantly tries to get better, and that's enough for me for the moment. Maybe I'm not improving as fast as others, nor making as much as people who are playing above their bankroll, but that's ok with me. I'm pretty sure I'd have to quit my hectic job if I wanted to focus even more on poker. So, my message to my hotel-posting friend is: money isn't as important as you think it is; making the correct decisions and playing well and within your bankroll is. The money will come as a side effect over time. For my part, I'm happy to wait, as long as I play my best game every time and learn something every time I play. Occasionally, I feel a twinge of worry that the games will dry up before I have a chance to cash in at higher limits, but I really believe I'd have to go to full-time professional now to do that, and I don't want to quit my job and take that life-risk at the moment. If I miss the best part of the boom, I'll miss it. I'm thinking long term here.

I'll end with this link to an excellent Barry Tanenbaum article that I (ironically) just read before going to bed last night. His point is that there is much luck in poker that is hidden, and you could be experiencing a lot of that kind of luck and not even realize it. I think so many players, probably Mr. Hotel included, have generally good basic poker skills but also have, on top of that, gotten really lucky in this way over the last year or two. It's not that they can't overcome it and get better; it's just that their hidden luck might lead them believe that amazing results are normal. In fact, I know from experience that those amazing results are simply a cushion that will later help you survive the times when your hidden luck suddenly transforms into someone else's overt luck — every time they are in a pot with you. Don't be a fundamentalist about it; Don't assume that your better-EV-than-thou faith in The Great Sklansky and your excellent recent results actually measure how good you are. We all suck a little bit and we all are God's proverbial gift to poker a little bit. Sure, read Sklansky religiously and be proud of your results, but remember that poker isn't as simple as Cake, or Death.

Something lately about poker chatter annoys me. I've worked hard in my game to let absolutely nothing at the table annoy me. I used to get annoyed at rule infractions, people calling plain-old “trips” a “set” and other such things that are pointless that should never impact one's emotional state. Sometimes I get overly annoyed at the way the club is running a table, but I at least have the good sense to quit the game rather than keep playing when annoyed. Ranting here is a way to vent it without putting it into the table. So, here's one of those rants.

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The term “cooler” is just being abused all over the place. In other words, “cooler” is the new “nice hand, sir”. People lose money and then like to argue that there was no way they couldn't have gotten away from the situation where they lost.

Since I have a few readers who aren't assimilated deep into poker lingo, I should explain what the term “cooler” means traditionally. (I suppose this explanation will offend my friend, a lexicographer who works for the Oxford American Dictionary, but someday, he and I will actually get to work on a real dictionary of poker.) For the moment, I suppose I should refer to the mediocre (at best) dictionary we have, which is Wiesenberg's Official Dictionary of Poker. He defines cooler, and the original term it's derived from, as follows:

cold deck

(n) — A deck, presumably with preset hands in it (usually with several good hands, the best of which will go to the dealer or his confederate), surreptitiously substituted by a cheat for the deck he is supposed to be dealing. So called because, after cards are dealt for awhile, they warm a bit to the touch, while a cold deck actually feels cool. To bring in a cold deck, the thief must perform a switch. A cold deck is also known as a cooler.

A literal “cold deck” was something you actually had to fear in the old days. During the riverboat era of poker in the 1800s, for example, poker was primarily a game of “cold decks” to trick tourists. These days, encountering a crooked dealer working with a player is rare indeed, and the terms are generally used figuratively rather than literally — for situations that come up where one player was doomed to lose the maximum to another.

And, like anything in poker, people latch onto the term as way to excuse their own bad play. Most poker players will jump through hoops to find a way to blame something or someone else for mistakes they've made. The figurative use of the word “cooler” is just that — a way to say, What else could I have done? when there often could be something else done.

For example, I've heard people call it a cooler when their out-of-position opponent flops a set when they have aces and bets into them. I've heard people say having K-Q on a K-Q-T board is a cooler when their opponent has KK, QQ, TT, or AJ. I've heard people say when they have the King high flush against the Ace high flush, it's a cooler. These situations are not coolers. They are hands you can get away from if you play them correctly!

Heck, even the would-be classic HE cooler — AA vs. KK preflop — isn't really one when the money is deep. When your opponent puts in the fourth raise and you have KK, what else does he have? Is he really doing that with QQ or AK? It's pretty hard for him to have exactly the other two kings, after all.

The proverbial coolers are situations that you actually can't get away from no matter what you do. Before you go running off saying it's a cooler, take a close look at your play, ask a better player than you, and try to figure out if you could have gotten away, or at least played it slightly differently to minimize your losses.

( Finally, though, for those of you who are guilty of abusing the term, don't feel too bad, as there are pros that do it too. (Examples given, but they are spoilers for some GSN's High Stakes Poker Episodes.) )

Anyway, think twice or three times before you go calling something a cooler. It probably isn't one most of the time.

Here endeth my rant; hopefully this is enough to get it out of my system and stop me from ever thinking of it again. Of course, my goal is for my opponents to think it's a cooler every single time I beat them, so I will try hard not to point out what is and isn't a cooler at the table.

I have talked a lot about the NL game at Foxwoods. I have gone back and forth about whether or not their NL games are run well enough to be worth playing. I once claimed that I would never play in the $1/$2 NL game again. Although I can't seem to find the post in my archives (perhaps it was said in a comment), I have also seen bizarre rebuy rules enforced at the $2/$5 game, where a floor person told me I could not top off to a $500 (maximum buy-in) stack until I was below the $200 minimum. I've since gotten around the rule by being a bit more sly about it, but as far as I know, it's still in place.

I went yesterday with two NYC Players (Dawn of I Had Outs) and Alceste) to Foxwoods. I warned them about everything I knew and felt about the NL HE games at Foxwoods, but they wanted to see the place for themselves, and I looked forward to showing what was once my home poker room to some fellow NY players.

I mostly played limit for the day, but I spent a good amount of time taking breaks and looking at what was going on at the NL HE tables. I kept a close eye on the $2/$5 tables and didn't really see any particular reason that I should be jumping to them. Sure, the games seemed generally beatable, but I didn't see anything to indicate that a good score could be made. Most of the players seemed somewhat tight, so I could imagine a strategy of trying to run over the table would be profitable, but not greatly so.

Based on my limited observations, what I believe has happened in the $2/$5 NL game is that it has become much like the $10/$20 limit games at Foxwoods. All the Foxwoods limit regulars have known for years that the $10/$20 limit HE game is the toughest game at Foxwoods. Sure, it's beatable, but it's where you run into the best players. This is because there is little reason for the small stakes gambler to jump up from the $5/$10, because with the kill it plays almost as $10/$20 in an action game. Meanwhile, the bigger gamblers go for $20/$40, because it has the draw of being the biggest regularly running limit HE game. Everyone I know who plays serious limit HE (such as roryk, reddogace, and good old F.D. who started at the $2/$4 tables with me, play almost exclusively that game when at Foxwoods).

What I see at $2/$5 is the people who have learned some things about NL HE but haven't built their bankroll up for the $5/$10 or $10/$20 game. I'm about in that category, so I'm likely to find settling in at $2/$5 players about at my skill level. So, with a huge time charge, I'm going to rate to lose in that game because I'm sitting with relatively evenly matched players; the low stakes gamblers will prefer to make ten rebuys and goof off at $1/$2 and the serious ones are going to try the $5/$10 or $10/20 blind game.

I was actually one of the first six people who were dealt the first hand ever of the $1/$2 NL game at Foxwoods, which was on Saturday 1 May 2004, as I sat in the game the first time they called (with the goal of learning more NL). Foxwoods realized the popularity of this game quickly and it grew. Their goal, however, has always been not to design a game that the regulars would like, but rather build one that would draw the maximum number of people from other parts of the casino. In other words, their goal (not surprisingly) is to maximize the number of people in the casino they could get to pay exorbitant time charges.

Now, I realized and posted a long time ago that the math of the NL game doesn't work out well. An entire buy-in leaves the table every hour, so you have to move chips early to build a stack that can be used to get people's chips before they are lost to the house. One of the tools you can use is the $40/$100 rebuy trick, whereby you pay a blind from a minimum $40 buy-in, and then rebuy to make your stack $138. This helps a little, as long as you can double up quickly.

The other system I use in this (and all capped buy-in games) is to always pay the time charge and dealer gratuities out of my pocket. This is very important, because if you waste your stack of a limited buy-in with time charges, that $10 in the first hour you pay is actually $20 of from your stack, because you can't use it for a double up. Over a few hours, you've paid $30 or $40 in time charges, and imagine how much double-up and redouble-up money you've lost! Thus, I have tipped and payed time out of chips in my pocket for years at the Foxwoods NL HE games. At times, some people at the table asked if this was allowed, and the floor people always said it was no problem.

However, sometime in the last six months, they have made yet another bad rule change. In addition to not being able to rebuy in an NL game until you are below the minimum buy-in, players at Foxwoods NL HE games can no longer pay time out of their pocket. I spoke with a floor person at length about this, and he was completely unable to come up with a good argument. At first he said they didn't want the confusion of people taking chips in and out of pockets, making it more difficult to watch if money was taken south. But, I asked him, are you still allowed to tip dealers from your pocket?, and he said yes. I therefore maintained that his argument was flawed, because if one can take a chip from the pocket to the table in that case, how is taking time the same way any different?

His next piece of sophistry was even more bizarre. He claimed that since some players might not have adequate bankroll to take time from their pocket (i.e., their case money is on the table), that players taking time payments from their pockets was a violation of table stakes rules, because the player that pays time from his pocket is gaining the advantage of keeping that amount of money in his stack. Of course, this is patently silly. The idea that one can take incidental expenses from the pocket or from the stack has been a long-standing rule in poker, and the time charge should be treated no different than any other incidental expense. In addition, how is this any different from my ability to buy into a game for the maximum while someone else can buy in only for the minimum? That gives me an advantage, of course, but that's just poker.

Both his arguments twist a long-standing permission for players and turn it strangely into a requirement. It's always been the case that if some players choose to pay their incidental expenses (time charges and gratuities) from their stack, that's a prerogative that they are granted by the “incidental expenses during a poker game may leave the table” rule. Making that prerogative into mandate is completely silly.

Foxwoods could make a consistent argument here, saying that the confusion of people going into pockets for chips is too likely to allow people to hide that they've “gone south” (a poker slang term for taking money that is in play in a game from the table). If they wished to make this argument, they would have to mandate that a player may not be possession of any Foxwoods chips except those that are on the table, and that they may not pull gratuities from their pocket under any circumstances. Even more, they could remove the (already annoying) “cash plays as chips” rule of Foxwoods, and they could even say that you can tip in cash but not chips.

But, the truth is that Foxwoods has no interest in making the rules consistent. Indeed, they have no interest in making rules that help regular players. They have no interest in making it so someone can take full advantage in a NL HE game. The truth is, they are a limit club, and they know their regulars are only going to play limit anyway. If they keep the limit players happy, they will have their regular daily client base. Meanwhile, they know that the tourists will want to find NL HE games that don't scare them. At each stakes level, they don't want the tourist intimidated by the big stack. They tolerate the players who stay and build a stack, but that's not really the clientele they want or care about. They want the games to play small to keep people buying in one-buy-in-at-a-time and losing it, all the while throwing their time right from that stack into Foxwoods coffers. They want them lose a moderate amount on the trip, and come back six months later and do it again.

In other words, they don't care about the poker community, or running games that serve that community. What they care about is their own internal competition with the blackjack pits, the craps pits, and the roulette wheels. It's well-known that the Foxwoods poker room has long been treated with contempt by dealers and floor people from other parts of the casino. They don't make as much money, and because of the requirement that all dealers throughout the casino pool all tips, everyone feels that the poker room free-rides on the huge tips received at the high-limit gambling games elsewhere in the facility.

Foxwoods is just a poorly run poker room. They are the poker monopoly of New England, and therefore have no reason to change their terrible policies. I still enjoy the place, because it has special meaning to me. My weekly bus trips there taught me how to win at poker beyond pennies on a dining room table. But, tradition can only hold one for so long when a place is run so poorly.

It's not to say that the games aren't beatable. It's not to say they aren't relaxing. I enjoy going there for the limit games from time to time, because the resort as a whole is nice and when going with a group who aren't poker players, there are opportunities for everyone to do something they enjoy. But, I think my Foxwoods days are done beyond that. I'm going to write a letter to the poker room manager and explain my reasoning, and perhaps there might be some hope of getting a reasonable response.

Anyway, thanks, Foxwoods, for helping me build my bankroll so I'm well beyond the $2/$4 limit games where I started, but I think you don't have much to offer a poker player anymore. Especially if your goal is to make up silly rules that help you only in the short run. I gave you more chances to improve than I really should have. Shame on me for actually thinking you were trying to make the place better.

This is what happens when you let an agent win the WSoP. Darnit, Wasicka, why didn't you play more aggressively heads up?

Someone bought me as a well-intentioned gift, Phil Gordon's day-by-day page poker calendar, called Poker: The Real Deal. I always feel bad not using calendars people give me, so I have dutifully used it throughout the year. Each day, it gives a pithy comment to “help improve your poker game”. It had yet to say anything that good; most of the advice was simplistic things about limit poker that anyone who has read a poker book once knows.

But, yesterday, it gave a piece of advice that I often see experienced players forgetting over and over:

A good poker player can beat just about any low-limit game. If you are not consistently beating the madmen and morons at the $3/$6 table, you probably are not going to be able to succeed at the middle limits.

I have so often heard “good” players say they can't handle $2/$4 anymore or the people play so bad I can't beat them. I do agree that beating players that bad is as boring as your worst high school teacher's lecture, and that sometimes those low limit games make it really difficult to beat the rake. Other than that, though, this advice is spot on and everyone should take it to heart.

I sometimes use low limit games to challenge new parts about my game; Negreanu and Ivey both suggest playing below your stakes and trying to win “every hand” as an exercise in reading people well. (Negreanu claims that you're doing well if you try this and stay even over a long session.) But, the important thing is: no matter how far you are along in your poker development, you should be able to sit down in any small stakes game and be able to beat it.

I read something in another blog that I had been meaning to mention here as a bit of advice for newer players. It's a simple tidbit of live play help that I've actually never seen mentioned elsewhere. I was therefore excited to see it mentioned in Steve's Poker Notes, an online journal of a semi-pro player in Texas. (LJ users will want this syndicated feed.)

One of the toughest parts about playing live if you are new — either because you are a new player altogether, or because your previous experience has been online — is tracking the pot size. I began with limit HE, which is a nice starter course. For limit games, you only need to count how many small bets are in the pot, then divide in half after the flop action, then start counting big bets from there. You are also always just adding one to a number already in your head, so pot-counting can become an automatic background task of your brain with practice.

NL games are more difficult, because you usually need to keep track in dollar amounts, or at least number of chips (if, generally, people have the same color of chips). To aid in counting, about six months ago, I started getting into a defined habit right after the preflop action ends. As the action closes on the preflop round, I pull aside from my stack the amount that is in the pot. Steve recently posted that he does the same thing.

This movement has a number of advantages. First, you have a reference for the pot size as the flop action starts, in case you lose count. Second, if you feel that making a quick bet is the image and feeling you want to get across, you can quickly make both full pot-sized and half-pot (by cutting the stack in half) bets without any counting.

My River Street colleagues probably remember me as one of “those” players who took forever to act. The truth that I never told anyone but nick_marden at the time was that I spent half that time putting the action back together and figuring out how much was in the pot. I have a good memory for action in a poker game, and can often reconstruct the pot size at any moment, but it wastes time and distracts from thinking about what is actually going on. It's better to have a reference handy so you don't need to recount.

I have found this little organizational trick to work best on the flop. Recently, at the Wynn, I experimented with doing it on the turn and river in very deep stacked games. I found there was a certain amount of fumbling required to get the (usually now large) pot size set aside before the turn came out, all while trying to watch my opponents reaction to the turn card. So, I gave up continuing that experiment for a while. Since then, I've been thinking that maybe pulling two times the pot size aside preflop might be an aid in speeding along this process and make it possible to have a similar “reference stack” for the turn as well. (Note: in shorter stacked (100 big blind buy-in) games, it's unlikely there will be enough chips behind as the turn comes for the exact amounts to matter past that point. Typically in such games, everyone only has a pot size bet left if there has been significant action on the flop.)

Another edge this process gives you is that you never actually have to glance at your chips during the flop betting round. Not even to count your own bet, raise or call. This allows you to watch your opponents instead, and makes sure you don't have the classic Caro “chip glancing” tell when you hit the flop. You just train yourself: I have no reason to look at my chips during the flop round, so I won't no matter what.

Finally, if you are a nervous chip handler — meaning, you always want to play with chips — this gives you a working stack to play with that actually has some meaning. Oh, do note that if you do have that chip riffling nervous habit, be sure you don't stop or riffle more vigorously based on what's going on in the hand. I used to have a tell whereby I fumbled more with chip riffling if I was worried my opponent was about to do what I didn't want him to do (which allowed someone to fake a call, see I reacted poorly, and then go ahead make the call). Now I don't play with chips at all once I've acted on a particular betting round for this reason.

Anyway, it was good to see, with Steve's post, that this method of counting the pot from your stack isn't just a silly personal habit. Looks like it might be a useful piece of advice to new players.

( Spoiler alert! I am live-blogging the main event final table which I am watching on pay-per-view. Feel free to click through the link if you want to see what is happening as it happens; be sure to reload often. )

02:00 EDT:

I am live-blogging the pay-per-view ESPN Coverage. I start a new post each hour.