Money Hater

“This is all just a run-good contest”, a friend of mine said to me recently. He has been an online pro for several years and done quite well. And he’s right.

I have found that the run-good is something that you either have or you don’t. If you have ever won a World Series Of Poker event or any other big dumb +ev lottery poker tournament, you have it. Regardless of whatever else you have done (or will do) in poker, you have it if you get to win one of those things.

Last week I drove a friend of mine to the airport for his red-eye flight to Florida. He had a 2 hour layover in Atlanta and got in to Florida at 6am.

“You have a middle-seat, too?” I asked him.

“Probably”, he matter-of-facted.

“Why don’t you go online and pay the 20 bucks for an exit aisle and get all that extra room?”

“I usually just charm whoever’s working at the gate.”

“Yeah. That’s what you do.”

As I am driving home, he texts me to inform me that his flight was overbooked, so he inquired about what he could get for giving up his seat. They got him a direct flight so not only would he get in sooner, he also wouldn’t have to change planes and waste 2 excruciating hours in the middle of the night in the Atlanta airport. They also put him in first class. And they gave him a $450 travel voucher as reparations for this colossal inconvenience.

He has also won a World Series of Poker event. He has the run-good.

Poker is a gambling game, and as such those who play it are subject to the whims of lady luck. This is not to suggest that poker is a game based purely on luck. On the contrary. Playing poker well (especially limit hold’em) requires a significant amount of skill. It also takes a significant amount of skill to decipher who is a good player and who isn’t, because our typical methods of assessing quality of performance do not hold true in poker.

In just about every endeavor that we embark upon, the litmus test for the quality of that endeavor is the results. How fast did you run the marathon? What did you get on the test? What did you shoot for 18 holes? All of these tasks produce tangible results that provide a reasonable metric for judging the quality of the effort. You shot 74? You must be a very good golfer. You shot 128? You must be a very bad golfer. Both assumptions made here about the quality of the players are reasonable and accurate; if you shoot 74 you have to be good and cannot be bad, and if you shoot 128 you have to be bad and cannot be good.

Poker results also can provide a good indication of the quality of the effort, but the scale that is required to obtain meaningful results is one we are not used to dealing with. A round of golf takes a few hours. A marathon is also measured in hours, as are most tests. But poker takes thousands and thousands and thousands of hours to produce meaningful results.

The poker tools website ev++ has developed a poker variance simulator that can be used to demonstrate just how much luck influences the results of poker.

Assume we have 1,000 poker players who play $10/$20 6-handed limit hold’em online. They play 4 tables at a time and play 600,000 hands in a year. (This equates to about 1,500 hours of “work”, and is a schedule that an actual professional player can easily adhere to.) All the players are of the exact same ability and are expected to win 0.5BB/100 (the same as 1bb/100), which equates to $60,000/year. (Basically they are all clones of the same player.) Plugging those numbers into the simulator along with a reasonable standard deviation, we get the results below in the form of a graph. Multiply the vertical axis by 10 and you get dollars. Multiply the horizontal axis by 100 and you get number of hands.

To make the graph easier to read, it only shows how the “hottest” (green) player did over the year and how the “coldest” (blue) player did. The results of the other 998 players fall somewhere between the green and blue lines. The dashed line indicates how the players would have fared if there was no luck at all involved.

All of the players are projected to make $60,000 based on their skill level, but the player who lady luck smiled upon made in the neighborhood of $145,000 and the poor fellow that she decided to smite ended up LOSING about $38,000. Both are “winning” players who make decisions that will ultimately show a profit, but one got lucky and the other one didn’t. This was over the course of an entire year, and still there was over a $180,000 spread between the biggest winner and the biggest loser. And this is a sample of only 1,000 players. The poker boom of 2004, where every frat boy and ESPN watcher gave online poker a whirl is dead and gone, yet at this moment there are still over 160,000 people playing at PokerStars.

It’s easy to see where a layperson could go with this. “You played all year and LOST almost $40,000? You need to quit. You must be terrible. That guy over there made over $140,000. Maybe you should pay him to teach you how to play.” (And thus was born one of the biggest rackets around; the poker coaching industry.)

It gets even more dicey if we replace the 1,000 players who are projected to win $60,000/year with 1,000 who are all projected to lose $30,000/year.

In this case the player that lady luck smiled upon won about $57,000 over the year. His results look like what the results of the first 1,000 players were supposed to look like, but he is not nearly the player that they are. But his results say that he is. (This is actually very unlucky, because often this player will think he is a good player and start playing higher stakes and even quit his job to become a professional poker player. Needless to say, things do not end well for him.)

If the results of an entire year of play cannot paint a clear picture of one’s ability, how do you know who’s any good and who isn’t? Ultimately it comes down to the decisions that players make while playing hands, and the rationale that they use for those decisions. There are plenty of players out there with fine results, but when you ask them to explain the reasons for the decisions they make they either cannot do it or the rationale they give is easily shown to be faulty. Many of them know that they cannot give a reasonable explanation for what they did and laugh it off by saying something like, “I dunno I was just smashing buttons”. After all, they’ve got great results over 600,000 hands so they must be doing something right. Right?

I’ve been enjoying some online poker of late and think I may need to buy a 30inch monitor so I can truly geek out behind the computer (although I must admit that they are awesome and anyone who sees one will surely want one.) The problem is that they’re not cheap, and while this expense is one I can easily cope with I (like many I assume) don’t like parting with large chunks of money. Especially since I have a very adequate set up as it is, and thus do not require this monitor. But they sure are cool, hence my dilemma.

It appears that the one to get is made by a company that is constantly having sales and coupon codes and other promotions that essentially keep the price of everything they have in a state of flux. If you’re diligent you can save a few hundred bucks by waiting a week or two until the price dips on your desired item. A few hundred bucks. Even $175. I can do a lot with a $175, but at the same time paying the $175 isn’t going to kill me. But it’s $175 and what I have is fine and are you really such a spoiled brat that you need this stupid thing (that you don’t even need) this very second right now? Apparently I am not, but while contemplating this purchase I discovered that I would be a spoiled brat and order it immediately if I’d only save $50 for waiting. I didn’t know it before today, but evidently I can burn 50 bucks.

I recently played a hand against a very good player where I won the hand, and he got the money.

He posted his SB and BB in the CO, everyone folded to him and he checked, the button folded, an old man called 1 chip in the SB and I checked K4 off suit in the BB.

The flop is AT8 rainbow. I know the CO very likely has absolutely nothing here. He raises any A, K and maybe Q here preflop, and proably any two cards 6 or higher. When he checked preflop, he told me he had nothing.

The SB checks, and I check because I know CO is going to bluff 100% of the time here and that I have his hand beat. He knows I don’t have an ace, and probably not a ten. The board looks kind of scary so he’s gonna fire at it. Especially since old man in the SB can have anything here, but would bet if he had an ace and maybe even a ten. He dutifully bets, the SB folds and I call.

The turn is another ten, making the board AT8T with no flush draw. I check, he bets and I call since that card changes nothing.

On the river I think I am beat if he checks behind, especially if a baby card comes. If he still has nothing on the river, he has to bet. He cannot have an ace, because he’d raise that preflop. The only tens he would check preflop are T5 off suit and worse. But he didn’t. He checked preflop so he has zilch. The only hands that beat me are T2 or 83 or similar garbage T’s and 8’s that he’d check preflop. If the river is a 5 and he checks, I know he just made a pair. Anything else he has to bluff hoping I fold a K or Q high draw.

The river is a 9. That is a good card for me. (I have seen him raise 92s on the button before, so he probably can’t have a 9 here either). If he bets, he has to be bluffing. He wouldn’t bet an 8 because nothing can pay him off and his kicker doesn’t play. I only lose to Tx.

I check, he bets, I call.

AT8T9

He turns over 76. Straight. I lose.

It seems that everyone is a poker coach these days. If you pay 2+2 a fee you can have “Sponsored Coach” under your 2+2 screen name, which in the eyes of the kind of people looking for poker coaching gives you immediate credibility. 2+2 has no real way of knowing if you are a good coach or are even good at poker. The people getting the coaching also have no idea if you are a good coach or are good at poker. After all, they don’t know how to play so they are going to believe what you tell them. It’s a racket. Anyone can be a coach. Anyone.

When I was considering moving to Los Angeles, I asked many people their opinions on how I would fare in the $100/$200 game at Commerce. One guy told me that he did not think I would be a winner. In less than a year I have pulled more money out of that game than I could make in several years of teaching. I think I am running a bit above expectation, but it is pretty clear I am a huge winner in that game. The fact that he could not see that I would at least be a modest winner in that game calls in to question his poker credibility (and likely makes me a fool for soliciting his opinion in the first place.) He went on to start one of the more successful poker coaching sites. Is this who you want your advice from? Someone who cannot spot an obvious winner? I wouldn’t, yet people are lining up to give this guy money. If he thinks I’m a loser, I can only imagine what he thinks winning play looks like. (The fact that he charges upwards of $500/hour for his poker coaching has been a source of laughter in the high stakes games at Commerce. Even the bad players know it’s a joke that he’s a “poker coach”.)

A founding member at another coaching site just resigned in disgrace among allegations (which likely have been substantiated here) that he was colluding. Why would a guy who supposedly kills the games want to risk losing his cash cow, unless he just wasn’t very good in the first place? This guy also wrote a book professing to teach one how to beat tough limit hold’em games. I have been playing with the co-author of this book of late, and while not a terrible player he makes a lot of mistakes that a “good” player should rarely if ever make. If you fork over $29.95 for his book he’ll tell you how to beat guys like me.

There are several coaches on 2+2 (OnTheRail15 and BigBadBabar to name two) who repeatedly post questionable strategy, and sometimes even downright awful stuff. OnTheRail15 doesn’t even know what the word “balance” means as it applies to poker, yet he uses “balance” as justification for some of the things he does. (It starts on post #36 of this thread, and when it was clear that he was making a fool of himself and had no way out, the moderator mercifully locked the thread and ended the carnage.) And since no one knows any better, they all nod and smile in agreement. It’s ridiculous. If you pay him $200/hour, he’ll be your poker coach.

According to Tableratings Doughnutz has lost over $400,000 playing on PokerStars. He will tell you that Tableratings is terribly inaccurate and thus should not be trusted. But when the site he coaches for introduces a new coach, they use Tableratings as a reference to prove the coach’s credibility. I guess they feel that Tableratings is only accurate if it shows that one of their coaches is a winner. If it shows he is a massive loser, well then it must be off.

Yet another “coach” suggested that a player he was coaching limp AA, KK and QQ UTG in the Canterbury $15/$30 game 30% of the time. For those of you who don’t play poker, imagine your financial adviser telling you that if given the choice between a free $5 bill and a free $10 bill, 30% of the time you should choose the $5 bill. And you pay him for this advice.

The list is endless. There is no regulation in poker coaching whatsoever. You need a license from the state to give $14 haircuts at CostCutters, but any idiot can charge you $250/hour to be your poker coach. It is an absolute racket.

The guy who started the Stoxpoker poker coaching site and also wrote what was labeled an “advanced strategy” poker book, just resigned from Stoxpoker because he violated the terms and conditions of one of the online poker sites that his (now former) business is in bed with. (He created and played on more than one account. It happens all the time, but it’s against the rules.)

I did not read his book, but I saw one of the hand examples he used (it involved a set of 2s) and recall being surprised that he was advocating playing it so poorly. It is now all starting to make sense.

The guy is simply an idiot.

That may seem harsh, but isn’t that exactly what you are if you risk losing your entire business because you wanted a new online poker nickname? If ever there was a time to use the word ‘idiot’, this is it.