Rhymes with Joker

Week Twelve Wrapup

I thought this was going to be a record week. When I started the week with two strong days, I thought I was looking at a record week, but then I got clobbered by several bad days in a row.

I don't think my game has changed significantly. What I actually assume the problem is, is a form of game selection: I'm playing in the extreme wee hours of the morning, where the only fish likely to be playing are drunk Hawaiians. And so, despite the occasional tagged fish, most of the players I've been playing with aren't making many mistakes. And if I'm catching only average cards, then I have plenty of opportunity to lose money with my own mistakes.

I could as easily have decided not to count the time-warp day out; the time-warp isn't extreme yet. But it will be. Alternately, I could shift the dates around and call week twelve the six-day week I've been planning to have to make my weeks start on Monday like normal people. But then I'll have to have another time-warp day.

The easy thing to do about this is to restrict my playing to the few hours either side of midnight, but the way my sleep schedule shifts around (I'm on a 25- or 26-hour day), I'm about to enter a stretch where I'm asleep then. So, I'll probably try to keep my play during the day as a second-best option.

I should see my sister tomorrow, and we'll make plans for Vegas. Currently we're thinking May 12–16. Is anyone going to be there? Let me know.

(Apparently I'm going to get an invitation to the wedding of someone I once dated. That's really strange.)

The (barely) winning numbers:

Poker in the real world

I ran across a poker reference in a short story that turns out to be about time travel (sort of), by Orson Scott Card, that gets the poker right. Strangely, the poker is immaterial to the story.

     One weekend he even took me to work with him. Doc made his living in Nevada. We left Salt Lake City on Friday afternoon and drove to Wendover, the first town over the border. I expected him to be an employee of the casino we stopped at. But he didn’t punch in, just left his name with a guy, and then he sat in a corner with me and waited.
     “Don’t you have to work?” I asked.
     “I’m working,” he said.
     “I used to work just the same way, but I got fired.”
     “I’ve got to wait my turn for a table. I told you I made my living with poker.”
     And it finally dawned on me that he was a freelance professional—a player—a cardshark.
     There were four guys named Doc there that night. Doc Murphy was the third one called to a table. He played quietly, and lost steadily but lightly for two hours. Then, suddenly, in four hands he made back everything he had lost and added nearly fifteen hundred dollars to it. Then he made his apologies after a decent number of losing hands and we drove back to Salt Lake.
     “Usually I have to play again on Saturday night,” he told me. Then he grinned. ”Tonight I was lucky. There was an idiot who thought he knew poker.”
     I remembered the old saw: Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play poker with a man named Doc, and never sleep with a woman who’s got more troubles than you. Pure truth. Doc memorized the deck, knew all the odds by heart, and it was a rare poker face that Doc couldn’t eventually see through.

(from "Prior Restraint," ©1990 by Orson Scott Card, in Aboriginal SF, September 1986, collected in Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card, New York: Orb, 2004.)

Week Twelve wrapup coming shortly.

Iggy asked a question about why it is we like blogs, as authors and as readers. I liked my answer so much I thought I'd share it. (And, also, my Email client is acting up.)

What I Like About Blogs, by Lord Geznikor Whompbucket

[Yes, that is a second-grade title. So?]

There are a number of things I like about blogs, why I read them and why I write one.

• Share the pain, or, we're all learning together. A lot of us bloggers are at roughly equal levels of skill. Iggy and Hdouble are probably a bit better than me, BG and Halverson are probably a bit worse than me, but we're all within a loud shout of one another in skill. (Those rankings are based almost entirely on what I read, and so may not reflect reality.) But the point is, that when one of us learns something about the game, most of the rest of us don't react with non-comprehension, nor incredulity ("Well, of course, stupid!"). It's either an important lesson we can learn, or have just learned, so reading the blogs has value in learning itself, or in confirmation that we aren't off the mark in what we've learned. Even bad beat stories, as tired as we all are of hearing them, have value, especially if the reader is running bad: it's not just him.
• Share the joy, or, somebody's gotta win, why not you? The flip side of that is that if someone is running good, particularly with tournament scores, and that person isn't a whole lot different from the reader, it gives the reader some hope that those big scores are out there for him, too. From the other point of view, not all of our coworkers and loved ones understand how truly special it is to outlast and outplay 10 or 100 or 1000 other players for a nice score. And so, posting your score to your blog provides the release of crowing about your victory, to people who truly understand the victory.
• I'm running good, or, I'm running bad. This is therapeutic for both writer and reader. If the writer is running good, then it reminds the reader who is running bad that things will improve, and it reminds the reader who is running good to be a bit more humble: you haven't figured the game out, you're just running good. If the writer is running bad, then it reminds the reader who is running bad that everyone goes through such streaks, and it reminds the reader who is running good that downswings do occur, and be careful. For the writer, posting about running bad is usually a plea for (perhaps silent) sympathy, and a bit of a release: You're a grownup, so you're not supposed to cry when your AA gets beat again, but writing about it can be an emotional release. The same release is evident when the writer is running good: Whether it takes the form of bragging or incredulity at the way one is running, it gets some of that glee on paper and out of one's system so one can look at one's play a bit more objectively.
• Community. Poker-playing is somewhat solitary, even in the casino. Yes, there are people you see over and over in the casino, but unfortunately most of them aren't the type of people you'd hang out with if you didn't have this common interest. Poker bloggers and their audience have two things in common: They love poker, and they're literate. I don't mean they "can read," which is the dictionary definition of "literate," but that they actually enjoy reading, which is how they find themselves reading (or writing) blogs. And so several bloggers I now consider to be friends, and I've chatted with a number of them, even though most live hundreds of miles away. I even met one, which was cool, because he turned out to have less hair than me.
• Entertainment. Some of the blogs are damn funny. Others are fairly straightforward but include some amusing bits, sometimes gleaned from other sources. For the writer, this allows an outlet and an audience for some of his own creative work, such as my own "Casey at the Felt" (see my March archives). It also allows an outlet for thoughts about other topics, like my baseball or BG's football or Mean Gene's politics. Fiction, too: If I were to write a short story, even a non-poker-related one, I'd probably put it on my site.
• A place to rest one's eyes. Low-limit poker online is mechanistic and in many cases boring. For those who play only one table, there is a lot of downtime even if there are twice as many hands as playing live. For those who play multiple tables, they have no choice but to play mechanistically, and having a mental escape hatch during the seconds-long stretches of downtime is important to keeping one's sanity. Hell, I'm writing this whilst playing four tables of $3/$6, for the same reason.
• The Cartesian Reason. I blog, therefore I am.

But What About Winning Players?

PartyPoker is offering a 15% deposit bonus through April 30 with the deposit code RELOAD. It maxes out at $100, which is 15% of $666.67 if you were planning on depositing.

But I haven't made a deposit since January. Oh, boo hoo, it's so unfair, winning players can't take advantage ...

Actually, I could, but I'd need to withdraw almost right away, too. And after a losing day yesterday, my online bankroll is below $2000, boo hoo hoo ...   —Actually, I probably have almost exactly $666.67 in my checking account at the moment, and $100 is $100. I'd have to play 1000 raked hands before the $100 is mine, but hell, I do that in a night.

Okay, I'm doing it ... there. Now I have a free $100 in my account. Deposits are instant (of course), so I see that free $100 in my account. I'll start the engine of withdrawal tomorrow. I wonder how I should log that? Probably "4/24 FREE MONEY +$100" or something. I wonder if I can do this twice?

Now for my biggest hope of all: I hope that the fish that take advantage of the bonus add greatly to my bottom line.

Another HAMMER Victory

Once again, my victory isn't perfect, but this time my HAMMER wasn't suited.

I was in the big blind, of course, and only one limper to let me see the flop. Something like QT4 rainbow. I check, the limper checks. Turn is another Ten, and I bet out. Limper folds, and I show:

#543675662: LordGeznikor wins $16 from
the main pot with a pair of tens.
patrickf: lucky hand
zeekule: very very GOOD hand
LordGeznikor: Fear the HAMMER!
lintoid: monster
#543677496: repine wins $19
zeekule: honestly, it was like candy from a baby

A Semi-Hammer

2♦7♦ in the big blind. I have the "Check/Fold" button pressed, because I've got three other tables that might get a hand, and I don't really care if people see that I've checked really quickly when it's my action.

Board flops A♦K♦Q♠. The small blind (angelsrule) bets out, almost certainly with an ace and maybe two pair or the straight. But I have a ridiculous flush draw, and so I raise. When the small blind three-bets, I call along, and get my diamond on the turn. Here I merely call, but he checks the river (another diamond), so I bet out. He calls, and I show my suited hammer for the win.

The funny bit is this exchange afterward:

#541383732: LordGeznikor wins $60 from
the main pot with a flush, ace high.
LordGeznikor: Fear the HAMMER!
angelsrule: fk off lord
LordGeznikor: I love you too

Week Eleven Wrapup

In short, this week wasn't nearly as triumphant as the preceding two weeks. It's actually sort of refreshing, really, to have a down week, in the sense that the pressure is off to keep posting $1000+ weeks. Of course, that said, I now need to post a $1000+ week.

I played in the casino twice this week, for miserable showings both times, for the same reason. It makes me think that casino play is very –EV for me, since the sitzendesfleisch to fold for four hours isn't necessary online: Playing four tables, the good cards will come. Pretty soon, too. It's the difference between playing 30 hands an hour, and playing 300 hands an hour.

On the other hand, playing solely online, while a much better EV for me, is a bit too solitary for my taste. I'm single, and even though Otto the Cat is pretty cool, to have Otto as my only companion most of the time would drive me buggy. So I'll continue to play in the casino, but maybe I'll cut it down to once a week or so. Except when I go back to Vegas next month.

I need to break another newly-formed habit. After two weeks that were more than $1000 to the good, I started thinking of myself as someone with money, and starting spending it a little too profligately. Playing in Detroit was fine on the way to see my sister, but I could have played during the day instead of the evening, and stayed with my sister instead of spending $100 for a hotel room. Ditto for the ballpark: Did I need to spend $40 apiece for the tickets, or would it have been just as fun to spend $10 apiece and sit in the bleachers? (Well, okay, they were pretty nice seats.)

I'm actually pretty good about going into "frugal mode" because of the number of times in my life I've had to do it, living paycheck to paycheck. But I've also become pretty good at convincing myself that this $50 thing or $100 thing or $500 thing was something that I really had to have, and I'll go back to being frugal afterward. (My second monitor falls in this category.) And, after so long of not really having money, there's a bit of thrill, still, at being able to say, "Oh, $275? No problem," and whip out a few Franklins.

Life as a gambler changes how you view money, as I told my mother once (she didn't like to hear it), and though I'm not at that level, I completely understand how, in McManus' book, he can be so blasé about betting the price of a nice luxury car on a bluff. Having $700 in my wallet would have been astounding to me just a few months ago, but now it seems no different than carrying $50 was. And it's different, because if I had only $50 in my wallet now, I'd be feeling pretty short-stacked.

(While on Amazon to get the link for McManus' book, I ran into a situation like what I was talking about a minute ago: Their front page recommended me to buy the second season of "Cheers," and damn me if I didn't click "OK, buy it" just as soon as I did the McManus link.)

In any case, here are this week's less-than-stellar numbers:

The day's best poker news:

• Iggy's Poker Blog

Fellow Michiganders' poker blogs:

• Gambling Blues (BG)
• Gadfly's Buzz
• Dispatches from the Culture Wars
• On Hiatus:          
• Royal Poker
• Ralph Nader's Poker Jam

Other poker blogs:
(People who whined about no link)

• Up for Poker
• The Cards Speak
• Chicago Phil
• Poker Index

Play poker online:

• PartyPoker
• Intertops Poker
• Doyle's Room
• Full Tilt Poker

Or in the casino:

• Kewadin Shores (1)
  in St.Ignace, Mich.
• Little River Casino (2)
  in Manistee, Mich
• Soaring Eagle Casino (3)
  in Mt.Pleasant, Mich.
• Greektown Casino (4)
  in Detroit, Mich.
• Motor City Casino <4>
  in Detroit, Mich.
• Harrah's (5)
  in E.Chicago, Ind.
• Trump Casino (6)
  in Gary, Ind.
• Leelanau Sands Casino (7)
  in Peshawbestown, Mich.
• Point Edward Charity Casino (NP)
  in Sarnia, Ont.
• ----
• Atom Feed