Ship It, Fish!

I've been playing pretty well the last week or so; nearly all NL HE. I've been very happy with my play, and somewhat happy with the results. I've gotten very good at manipulating the pot size so that people get all their money in when I have flopped a very good hand. I haven't been all-in with the worst of it in the last 20-30 all-in situations I've been in. Yet, I didn't win them all, of course, and I find this quote calming when it goes the wrong way:

If you are an excellent player, people are going to draw out on you a lot more than you're going to draw out on them because they're simply going to have the worst hand against you a lot more times than you have the worst hand against them.

Added to this, I also note that if you're a pretty good player, you're going to be particular good at tricking your opponents to take the worst of it, and thus adding to the times your hand can be outdrawn. The nice thing about NL HE against limit HE is that you almost always can set up these situations in the former where your opponent is mathematically incorrect in calling/raising you. Often in limit HE, you get the “I'm correct in betting and he's correct in calling” situation.

I also noticed no one has started keeping a running tally of how many days remain until banks must comply with the UIGEA. I am enough of a long-time net.citizen to recall when Internet countdown sites were still the rage, and I thought about adding a retro one to my journal, but for the moment, I'll just note that the final day of free Internet poker banking appears to be Wednesday 10 July 2007. Only 185 days to go. Here's a Perl one liner to tell you how many days to go:

Erick Lindgren (to Daniel Negreanu):

I had twice as many outs as Gus.

John Juanda interjects:

Nice needle, there.

( The context is a spoiler. )

A quote often overheard at the old R Club last summer:

Jay, I got the gin. You gotta flop me the juice.

At the old R Club, there was a dealer named Jay — a very young African-American fellow — who also played when he wasn't in the box¹. Jay is a strong player when he doesn't go off his game and goof around. He often kept the table entertained, both when playing and dealing, by making off-the-wall comments.

Somehow, he got it in his head that a pocket pair of nines would be called the “gin”. I don't know enough myself about alcohol to know if the number 9 somehow relates to a particular brand of gin. Also, there may be a subtle reference to the game of gin rummy, that I may also be missing.

Anyway, from there, Jay extended it into a name for a set of nines, and related it to a common line from hip-hop songs: I got the gin and the juice. It reached the point where it wasn't possible for someone to raise on a flop containing a 9 without someone at the club saying: He's got the gin — he's got the gin and the juice!. (Of course, that's bad poker etiquette but the old R club was somewhat informal.)

Indeed, the quote I opened with above eventually became a common saying when someone started the hand with any pair 44-99. The other players would know you had a pair, but didn't know what card made a set for you.

Also, a few weeks after this became a common shout, I flopped a set of 8s, going on to win a huge pot, while Jay was dealing. I said to Jay, Hey, what drink did you deal me?. He responded without a pause:

You got the vodka — you got the vodka and the tonic!

It's these goofy cultural crossovers that remind me why I love poker and the poker world. (I must admit that my knowledge of post-1990 rap is sub-par enough that I had to google the phrase last August before I was sure of my suspicions that it was some sort of hip-hop reference.) Over the years, I've expanded my mind and met people I would never have met otherwise, all thanks to poker.

Footnote 1: For my less poker-geeky readers, “in the box” is a phrase used to indicated that a dealer is currently doing his job. It refers to the fact that the dealers seat is usually centered by a rack of house chips (for making change, collecting the rake or time, etc.) and that the seat is always at the same place in the center of the oval poker tables.

This little quote always makes me think fondly of River Street, of Matt (whom I miss playing against, even though he's a better player than me) and of the silliness and looseness that old NL HE game in Boston:

It's great to think that somewhere, at some poker game in the world tonight, someone is saying 'I'll straddle — all-in'.

&mdash Matt H. (aka dankhank) of River Street