Money Hater

A large component of poker success is being able to recognize on what level your opponent is capable of thinking. The better you are at this, the better you will be at knowing what his hand is and how he will play it. Once you know what someone has and what they are going to do with it, they can never beat you.

Unfortunately, knowing your opponent very well is a tall order. If you are off even by a little bit, you can look like an idiot. I often look like an idiot.

My biggest weakness is that I tend to assume competent, winning players understand the game on a fairly high level. I am typically wrong.

The following hand was posted on a poker strategy forum and used as an example of how bad I am at poker. (The guy who beat me in the pot posted it.) It is just one of many examples of my idiocy.

I raise with two kings under the gun, 1 (maybe 2) people fold and a player calls.

The instant this happens, I begin to speculate about what this person has. With very poor opponents, I do not worry too much because they could have any two cards. This particular opponent, however, is a competent player so I am immediately confused by his play. Being the first caller here is incorrect. There is not a single hand that he can have here that he has not made an error with by just calling (as opposed to re-raising or folding). So now, as is often the case, I have to figure out where this player’s understanding of limit hold’em falls apart. I will get a better idea of what he has based on the flop and his flop action.

After he calls preflop, one other player calls and the blinds call.

The flop comes 754 of different suits.

The blinds check, I bet and the competent player now raises. This tells me a little more about his hand. I already know he screwed up something preflop, but now I have a better idea of what it is. The only hands that have connected with this board that a competent player can (incorrectly) have are 99, 88, 77, 66, 55, 44, 76s, 86s, 75s, 54s. He does not have KJ or some other nothing hand that he is trying to bluff with. He is not that level of stupid.

His preflop call indicates that he does not mind if players behind him come along and enter the pot. If he wanted to get rid of people, he would reraise preflop, thus putting tremendous pressure on the players yet to act. This tells me that he probably has a hand that can make a big hand and wants multiple opponents. Hands like 76s and 87s and 54s. These hands do not fare well against one or two opponents, but they do just fine when there are several players in the pot.

The other possibility is that he has a set of 7s, 5s or 4s. Allowing other players to enter the pot with any of these hands is a fairly large preflop error (especially given that by 3betting he can (a) secure position in the hand, (b) get 1.5sb of dead money in the pot by causing the blinds to fold and (c) isolate me with what may very well be the best hand), one that I am confident that he is not capable of making. So, I draw the line at “he’s bad enough to be the first caller with a suited connector, but not so bad as to do it with a pair.” I am comfortable with this “read” and play my hand accordingly.

I think he has either two pair, or some form of pair/straight draw combination.

After he raises the flop, the other caller 3bets, the blinds fold and I cap it. The competent player calls two more bets, (so he clearly likes his hand), and the other player calls.

The turn card is a 2. This is a good card for me and I have the lead in the hand, so I bet. The competent player now raises. This is bad news for me. I 100% do not have the best hand. He knows I have an overpair and raised the turn anyway. I am beat. Since he cannot have a set, I assume he has 2 pair of some kind, or maybe even a straight.

I now have to try to further pinpoint the level of bad this player is. He messed up his hand preflop, but how badly did he mess it up? To call preflop with 74 is horribly awful. He is not that bad so he cannot have that. Calling with 54s is bad, but not as bad. He might have that. He could have 75s, too. Hmmmm.

After he raises the turn, the button calls. I now know the button has some form of pair/straight draw combo, for he’d fold anything worse and 3bet anything better. So, I have him beat for sure. I call the turn raise hoping to river a K, but hating my hand.

The river is a 4, making the board 75424. This is a good card. I now beat the 75s that the competent player could have, and any straight draw that the button could have had missed.

I bet the river. The instant I did I regretted it. If my read is correct, then he either has (a) a busted up 2 pair (75s), a full house (54s) or a straight (86s). The only thing that happens if I bet the river is that he either folds or raises me. But if he raises me what can he have? He either is bluffing his 2 pair (75s), raising his full house (54s) for value, or raising his straight (86s) for value. None of these hands can call a 3bet from me, for if I 3bet this river I have exactly 77 or 44 (unless I am good enough to turn KK into a bluff here). If I am raised on this river I need to 3bet as a bluff, but he is not capable of folding a better hand. So, betting this river is extremely stupid.

He did indeed raise the river. The other player folded. I folded. He had 77. The one hand that I could never dream he would be bad enough to have, he had.

I am an idiot.

Poker tournaments and those little rubber bracelets that now come in a bunch of different colors (but started off yellow because of Lance Armstrong’s privates) are very similar; both are extremely popular and both are extremely annoying.

Both do a great deal of good for their causes; the poker tournaments pump dead money into the poker economy (which I then procure to fund my lavish lifestyle) whereas the bracelets drum up hundreds of thousands of dollars for various noble causes. Both are driven by people who are praying on what may not be considered a “miracle” but definitely is in “longshot” territory. Both came into vogue about 7-8 years ago. Both have hit their popularity apex and now are descending into who-knows-where. Both have gone from being vanilla to now coming in at least 5 different flavors.

Poker tournaments are basically just a cash game that everyone is too impatient to see play out in real time, so they throw in a bunch of rules to speed things up.

Thousands of people who think they know how to play poker have descended upon Las Vegas in hopes of catching a greased pig. (I know what you’re thinking, but “lightning in a bottle” seems too god-like to fit here and frankly is just too damn cliche. Winning a poker tournament and catching a greased pig are both endeavors in which the winner ends up exhausted, relieved and filthy, and thus gets the nod.)

Many of these descenders are “professional poker players”. Most of them are losing players who simply haven’t slammed to earth yet. They all come to Vegas, toss money into the giant WSOP machine, and hope they leave town with more than they came with. There will be guys on their last loan who leave Vegas debt free and with enough of a bankroll that they probably won’t even bust it by next year’s WSOP. In the interim they will travel around as a professional poker player and slowly give their money to me and a few other cash game pros. They’ll bring whatever they haven’t blasted off or spent on a car they cannot afford back to next year’s WSOP and repeat the entire process.

There are tales upon tales of guys who have been staring busto in the face but have had the governor show up at the 11th hour in the form of a big tournament score for themselves or one of their friends. They are in this perilous spot because they do not know how to properly manage their money. I know how to manage my money and thus have never been even close to broke, but I have to believe that I am still dumb enough to get lucky at the WSOP. So, this year I purchased 5% of the action of a player who is playing in 11 different events.

Today was his first event. It was No-Limit hold’em. 35 minutes into the tournament he is blessed with the opportunity to put in all of his chips with two magnificent aces. He got called by two badly beaten jacks. This is what it is all about; get the money in good and hope not to get screwed.

A jack came. An ace did not.

The World Series of Poker has begun.

A good friend of mine is a radiologist whose group reads the MRIs for an NFL team, which I find to be really cool. We were in Madison together when he was in med school and I was in undergrad. Being brilliant yet drunken morons, our conversations would often turn to some of the more absurd things one must experience while in medical school.

I recall my buddy explaining that for the rectal exam, a medical professional comes in and is both the victim and overseer of the examination. I vividly remember him using the word “feedback”. “Well, you get in there and then he tells you to feel for this and gives you feedback on what you’re doing.” I do not know why but for some reason that really cracked me up at the time, and apparently it still does.

This person gets up in the morning knowing that at some point later in the day someone is going to put something in their ass. And not only are they going to have to speak intelligently while it is happening, they also have to speak ABOUT what is happening.

Since I have been losing almost every single day, I have been wondering to myself what other professions entail one getting things shoved up their ass day after day. Well, I think Mr. Feedback’s job puts my whiny little downswing to shame. But then I thought more about it. If you are going to have things rammed into your backside, Mr. Feedback’s gig isn’t that bad. He knows if he will or will not be the victim of a most gruesome violation later in the day. These things are planned. He can prepare himself mentally.

I do not know how often (or if at all) or with what level of zeal things will be presented to my posterior when I walk into the card room. I just have to sit there and wait, knowing that at any minute it could be on at my expense.

Either torture me or don’t torture me, but the not knowing is making me insane.

A guy I used to teach with once told me that, “the known evil is much preferable to the unknown one.” I now fully understand what that means.

In a nutshell, someone is on “tilt” when emotion begins to dictate their actions.

I first heard the term in 2002 when I started playing $10 pot-limit single table tournaments at PokerBill’s 3rd story apartment in Uptown.

I had my first experience with tilt my senior year at UW-Madison. My friends and I would play hearts at 10pm every night during the week. There would be 4-5 of us, and we would play for an hour or so and then go back to studying or procrastinating or whatever we were doing.

One of my friends was prone to tilt. He would eat a bunch of hearts or the Q of spades or something, and he invariably would make a mistake leading the next trick because all he could think was “god damn that sucked”. We didn’t call it tilt back then, even thought it was the same thing. (We actually called them “god damn” plays, because “god damn” was written all over his face.)

Since that time, I have come to learn that tilt is truly the double-edged sword of poker. I am sure that I have made a great deal of my money because of people going on tilt. I like nothing more than to see someone who typically plays pretty well take a few stinky ones and then start 3betting the 84s. Now suddenly a person who would normally be pulling money out of this game is actually pumping money into it. Fantastic. Tilt is destroying this guy, while fattening the coffers of those of us who have better self-discipline.

There are many different strains of tilt. Below I have attempted to list a few different types of tilt and some of their major attributes.

StuckTilt - This form of tilt usually comes about when a player has been losing and now realizes that it is getting to be time to go home. This player does not like to leave if they have lost money on the session, so they now must do everything they can to get their money back, regardless of how fantastically awful it is. (I once heard a player talk about needing to “make something happen” soon, for he had to leave in 45 minutes and was down over 50 bets.) This involves playing more hands than they would if they were winning, and often can involve such stupid plays as limp/reraising the 96 of diamonds, being the first coldcaller on the button with T7s or some other such nonsense hand.

BeatTilt/SlightlyStuckTilt - This kind of tilt grips many. I play with several who suffer from this form of tilt affliction. They lose a few pots in a row, usually in absurd fashion (after all this is limit hold’em), and now it is time to tilt. They will often say things like, “Can’t win with good hands, so might as well play bad ones”, as they rake in a massive pot with the 86 of clubs that they inexcusably called 3 bets cold with and have now unceremoneously rammed up the ass of some poor guy who has been waiting for hours to finally get two aces. An interesting characteristic of this form of tilt is that once the tilter wins this huge pot with the 86s (or whatever shitbox they chose to misplay), they are immediately cured and off tilt. They tend to go back to playing in their typical fashion. If the tilter is not fortunate enough to win a pot by playing super bad, they now become a high risk to succumb to other forms of tilt such as ScreamingGorrillaTilt.

PersianAssholeTilt/GuyWhoIsSupressingHisHomosexualityTilt - Just as its name suggest, PAT afflicts only Persian men. This form of tilt emanates itself in a variety of ways, but it almost always involves an altercation with the dealer. It may be as subtle as ignoring the dealer when he/she asks, “Would you like the big blind, sir?” The tilter now has the dealer trapped. If the dealer skips him, he can yell and scream and lie about having his money out there and say, “What are you blind or something?” (if the dealer is female he can use the trusty Persian favorite “too much sex last night, honey?”) and just be an overall asshole. If the dealer does deal them a hand, he can now scream at the dealer for not paying attention and say, “Do you see my money out there? Why did you deal me in if there was no money out there? Are you blind? Don’t you know how to do your job?” If the dealer simply waits for the player to signal if they want the blind or not, the player can now berate the dealer for holding up the game and will typically say something like, “I have been playing here for hours and I am still sitting here. You think I am suddenly not going to play now??!?!” I find this form of tilt to be the most irritating.

UnintelligbleTremblingWithFrustratedRageAsianGuyTilt - This form of tilt is not as common as one might think, and is in fact rather rare. Given that many Asians play poker, many assume that if an Asian guy is on tilt, it must be UTWFRAGT. This simply isn’t true. I have only seen UTWFRAGT a few times, and it looks exactly like it sounds. The guy is shaking and frustrated because (a) this dealer is kill him and (b) no one can understand what the hell he is saying, in spite of their best efforts to do so. This form of tilt has not been widely studied, but it usually results in the guy leaving.

WhiteJackAssWhoThinksHe’sAProfessionalPokerPlayerButHasNoChanceTilt - This type of tilt affects people who are capable of playing rather well, but do not understand how being a professional poker player works. The play of those afflicted with this form of tilt often does not suffer that much. They are often heard to say such things as “Yeah, I’m still exhausted from that 28 hour sesh I played this weekend. I got buried and ended up being there all night chasing my money.” The afflicted often will often snidely comment on the poor play of others, but almost never berate dealers. Players who suffer from this form of tilt for prolonged periods often end up being afflicted with BeatTilt/SlightlyStuckTilt as well and sometimes even ScreamingGorillaTilt.

ScreamingGorillaTilt - This form of tilt is my favorite. It usually afflicts bad players, but it has even been seen in professionals. Nothing is out of bounds when one is on ScreamingGorillaTilt. Players afflicted with this have been known to tear cards in half, crumple cards and hurl them across the table or even shove the cards down the rake hole. It is a free for all when SGT is involved. I hesitate to attempt to describe it further, for words cannot adequately convey the essence of SGT; it must be seen to be truly understood.

As I was getting chips from my box at Commerce, my phone buzzes telling me I have a new text message:

“That jackass who won LAPC is here.”

First place in that event was $1,686,760.

I had been wondering when this guy was going to show up and begin the long, slow but steady process of blowing everything that he won by interpreting his tournament win as confirmation that he should be a professional poker player, instead of the lightning-in-a-bottle, dumb luck event that it actually was. Even the best, most successful and respected tournament professionals will be quick to concede that one needs to get extremely lucky to win a poker tournament, and that making any long term projections based on the results of a single tournament is a fool’s errand.

I get my chips and walk out into the poker room to find that a must move 100/200 game is about to start, and The Champion will be playing in the game. I have never played limit hold’em with The Champion, but I suspect (as I do of anyone who has won a large no limit tournament and then plops down in a limit hold’em game) that he is simply horrible at limit. (The only time that this assumption did not prove to be staggeringly accurate was in the case of Gavin Griffin. He plays quite well, but 2008 player of the year John Phan is as bad as one can be.)

While we are waiting for our chips to arrive, The Champion opens up his little laptop. I notice that the wallpaper for his computer is the shot of him holding up his LAPC bracelet in front of that big pile of money. This sight not only cracks me up for the sheer absurdity of it, but it makes me feel even more confident in my assumption about his limit hold’em abilities.

“Hey, you’re the guy who won that tournament!. That’s great. Good job!”, I hear the voice of my buddy (and sender of the aforementioned text) say over my shoulder. To all but the most acutely trained of ears, this sounds like a genuine compliment. It has me fooled for a moment, but then I remember who I am dealing with. This guy greatly enjoys feeding the ego of anyone who desperately wants it fed, and it appears today that he has brought a big serving spoon.

The Champion blushes and then makes some joke about it actually being his twin or somesuch.

The game begins 6 handed. It doesn’t take long for the following to happen, although I cannot recall their true chronological order so I will simply list them:

-I give my buddy the eye that says, “Look at the wallpaper on his laptop.” He sees it, looks at me and grins a big, stupid grin.

-It becomes apparent that The Champion is a huge loser in most $100/$200 limit hold’em games.

-My buddy turns to me and while half-laughing/half-speaking says, “I would absolutely love to play with this guy every single day.” I am sure part of this is because he is bad at lhe, but another part is because every once in a while it will be time to get The Champion talking about his big tournament win. Such dialogues tickle my twisted friend pink.

My buddy gets moved to the main game, and not soon after The Champion and I tangle.

He opens the CO, I 3bet the SB with AQo, he calls.

Flop comes T63r

I bet, he calls.

Turn J bringing the 2nd heart.

I bet, he raises, I call intending to fold if the river is my father’s business card. Any other card and I will be calling.

River is a black 2.

I check, he checks.

I table my hand, he tables the K2 of hearts and points at the 2, I assume to help us see that he rivered a pair and chose not to bet. He put $800 into the pot when he had the worst hand, and $0 into the pot when he had the best hand. He was even going to put in another $200 on the river as a bluff if he didn’t make anything. Brilliant.

On the river, there are 44 cards that can come. If we assume I do not have a heart in my hand, The Champion will make a flush 9/44 times, a pair of 2s 3/44 times, a pair of kings 3/44 times (which is bad for him because I make a straight if a king comes) and 29/44 times his hand does not improve.

After the river he will have the best hand 12/44 times, but 3 of those 12 (when he makes a pair of 2s) he won’t even bet. He only bets if he makes a flush with one of the 9 hearts. (For the sake of simplicity, I am going to assume that he will check a river king because it completes the exact hand that he is trying to get to fold and now he actually has something and doesn’t need to bluff. I also am going to assume that I will check and call all rivers, even though I likely need to bet an ace and maybe a king or queen as well.)

So since I will never fold, his turn/river combination:

-wins him 2 bets 3/44 times (when a 2 comes) (+6 bets total)
-wins him 3 bets 9/44 times (when a heart comes)(+27 bets total)
-loses him 2 bets 3/44 times (when a king comes)(-6 bets total)
-loses him 3 bets 29/44 times (when his hand doesn’t improve)(-87 bets total)

This turn/river play wins 33 bets and loses 93 bets for a net of -60 bets in 44 hands.

60/44 = 1.36 bets.

Since a bet is $200, this turn/river combination costs The Champion $272 every time he does it.

$1,686,760/$272 = 6,201.32

He can play this bad 6,201 more times before he is broke.

A friend of mine will often send me text messages inquiring about the game. My response to her last night was,

“6 handed. Me, ST, UV, WX, some Mexican bald guy who has been playing a lot lately but is fucking horrible, and some tight Persian guy.”

“Wow. I am surprised at how slow it is there. How many chips does ST have in front of her?”

“11K”

“He might look Mexican, but he is Arabic I think. Big teeth and drinks green tea all the time?”

“I just called ST’s dumb ass down with AThh on a board of 75437r. She had the QJhh that she saw fit to 3bet from the SB and barrel away with mindlessly.”

“LOL. Good call, whiteboy.”

“Yeah, that’s him. He wears a ring with what looks like the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is a big Mexican thing. Plus, Mexicans like all that gay gold shit that he wears.”

I was never aware of the Virgin of Guadalupe until I read Ask a Mexican, a book that is a collection of columns written by a Mexican guy who simply answers questions that stupid white people have. Questions like “What is it about the word illegal that Mexicans don’t understand?” and “Why do Mexicans always park their cars on their front lawns?” and “Why are Mexicans always selling oranges on street corners? Is that like the national fruit of Mexico?” and “Why do none of the Mexicans in Louisville have jobs?”, the response to which was, “We take after Kentuckians.”

Needless to say, I absolutely loved this book, and from it learned about the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose image Mexicans plaster all over the place. The book itself was introduced to me by a gal who, upon learning what I did for a living, told me that she didn’t want to see me again because my job “freaked her out”. She was a waitress.

This record is one of the best I’ve heard in a long time, but this video/odd version of Lump Sum is really cool.

I wore my Wisconsin sweatshirt to Commerce today. As I was walking by the 30/60 stud game, I noticed that I was being beckoned over by a guy in the 5 seat. I had never seen him before. He had to be at least 80 years old.

“Are they going to make the tournament?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t really follow their basketball team?”

“Did you graduate from Wisconsin?”

“Yes, but I did my first two years of college at Villanova, and have always been a Villanova basketball fan and a Badger football fan.”

“I think they’ll make it. They are 10 and 7 in the Big Ten. The thing is, the Big Ten just beats up on itself all year long. What they need is a big black guy with broad shoulders to push everyone the hell away from the basket. But they always get these cheese eaters from northern Wisconsin.”

“They sure do.”