update on florida poker bill

The Florida poker bill situation is heating up; Jeb Bush is being aggressively lobbied by gambling opponents to veto the bill that allows poker games to go from $10 pots to $1-$2 betting. Link

Bush, who has on several occasions said he's opposed to expanding gambling, said he's not necessarily convinced the measure would do that, but said Thursday he hasn't decided whether he'll sign the bill.

Update: the bill passed.

Update: if you're looking for information on Florida poker room locations, the best info I have is here.

exchanges and betting

The recent "terrorist futures" fiasco, which so far has resulted in the resignation of John Poindexter, has also prompted some interesting discussion around the place. Here's a roundup of interesting links associated with the story:

review of stuey

A while back I mentioned the film Stuey, which debuted at the CineVegas film festival. A bunch of news about the film, which I am eagerly awaiting:

foxwoods wins new england poker battle

The Mohegan Sun is throwing in the poker towel and closing their poker room for good, filling it with slot machines. This will make Foxwoods the only New England poker room. Link

paypal pays $10m for gambling transfers

PayPal has agreed to pay the U.S. government $10m to settle allegations that it violated the Wire Wager Act and - get this - the Patriot Act - by transferring funds to offshore gambling sites. Link

This is pretty big news; although it doesn't establish a legal precedent since the case was settled, it does establish a basis for the DOJ to go after other fund transfer operations, makes it less likely that any US bank will approve online gambling transfers, and also could point toward the government eventually going after individuals.

The next step will probably be blackballing offshore payment mediators like Neteller and Firecash, who currently mediate payments between US banks and offshore gambling sites.

poker in hawaii

Hawaii is one of only two states without state-sanctioned gambling of some sort, but today's Honolulu Advertiser has a nice article on the rising popularity of poker in Hawaii, citing televised poker as one of the primary drivers.

"It's not like the movies with imaginary people winning imaginary money," says Lance Tamashiro, 22. "The World Series is real money. You have a guy with a pair in his hand going all in with five cards still left, and it's real money. It's crazy."

upcoming books

I just rolled out another feature courtesy of Amazon Web Services: upcoming books for the same categories as my bestseller lists. They are now permanent fixtures on the left sidebar.

Upcoming poker books
Upcoming blackjack books
Upcoming vegas books
Upcoming gambling books

There are some really interesting books slated for release.

• Poker Face (due August 12) is an autobiography by the sister of Howard Lederer and Annie Duke and sounds fascinating. As far as I know it's the first autobiography about a poker-playing family.
• Sure Bet (due September) is an anthology of gambling crime stories which may prove to be interesting.
• Fellow Austinite blogger Neal Pollack writes one of 52 poker vignettes in A Friendly Game of Poker (due October).
• Mike Cappelletti is coming out with his take on Omaha High-Low this fall.

In other book news, my copy of Dave Schwartz's Suburban Xanadu finally arrived. I'm looking forward to reading it and will post a review here for your reading pleasure.

clicks-and-mortar illegal bookies

The Arizona Republic has an outstanding exclusive with an ex-member of an Arizona betting ring that uses an online site to allow its clients to place bets without a credit card, and settles all payments and collections via cash in person.

The computer kept track of wins and losses. Monday morning Sam knew where he stood. So did his bookie, who had access to Sam's online account.

"The fact you don't have to put up a credit card is perfect," Sam said. "For a gambler, that's the last thing you want to do, leave a paper trail."

gambling field trips

A Philadelphia college professor takes his students on a field trip to Atlantic City (with Bill Kearney in tow) to study gambling up close and personal.

Allen Hornblum teaches urban studies at Temple University. For weeks, he's led discussions about the prospect of gambling in Pennsylvania.

They studied the good (jobs, money for schools), the bad (poor people losing what little they have), and the question marks (how to keep organized crime out of the game).

monopoly for money

I've been known to play Monopoly for money before, but never with the chance to win $100,000 -- the prize being offered in a promotion out of Reno which will be played on the world's largest monopoly board. Link

women and poker

The NY Daily News featured a decent, too-short article on women poker players this weekend.

Having seen the World Poker Tour, many women have gotten the courage that it takes to step over that scary threshold into a bricks-and-mortar casino," says Kathy Raymond, director of poker operations for Foxwoods Casino in Mashantucket, Conn. Reps for the show says about 30% of its viewership is female. "They're loving it. Women were seen at the final table winning big money and women were talked about as establishing their place in the poker world."

professional online gambler to face charges

In the first case I've ever seen of its kind, a North Dakota man is facing misdemeanor gambling charges for online betting. He became a professional sports gambler almost two years ago, earning enough to support his family and building up a bankroll of over $300,000.

Unfortunately for him, he thought it was legal, and reported his winnings as taxable income. He also hired an accounting firm that specialized in gambling (although evidently not enough to advise him that he was breaking the law).

It sounds like he specialized in middles (an arbitrage play using multiple sportsbooks - see here):

After learning the nuances of sports betting, Trauman discovered he could improve his chances of winning by anticipating shifts in point spreads, or “middling.” Basketball was one of the first sports he wagered on, even though he didn’t know much about the game. It didn’t matter, he told an investigator, because he only worked off the spreads.

more poker-politics analogies

As I Please has a brief history of "the buck stops here" and the current political situation as they relate to poker. Link

poker and iraq

Personally, I find analogies between drawing a good poker hand and killing our enemies in bad taste. There's something wrong about saying "yay, we just killed some more people -- now we have a full house!" But plenty of commentators are saying just that. Debra Pickett is a recent example:

I guess I was kind of squeamish about the whole "Wanted: Dead or Alive" aspect of the idea because the lines between assassination and preemptive "decapitation" strikes seemed so blurry.

But lately, I've started feeling like maybe I should embrace the idea. I decided to learn to play poker.

hard rock casino coming to biloxi

The Mississippi Gaming Commission approved development of a Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Biloxi. I've never been to Biloxi; apparently the poker is pretty good down there (although I doubt Hard Rock will be adding a poker room). Link

bad beat stories

You're not a real poker player without a good smattering of bad beat stories. Mr Helpful has posted a good little series of them from his recent tournament play.

Rather than proselytize before the almighty who could easily change my fortunes, it appears I have, instead, been praying to the god of the perpetual second best hand.

the sports guy

ESPN's Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy, has written a hilarious column about his gambling ways:

I've wagered on summer league basketball, the NBA draft (pick by pick), USFL rebroadcasts (a personal favorite), the WWE's Royal Rumble, Sopranos deaths and video football, with the computer playing both sides (another favorite). During a Celtics halftime, I even won 20 bucks on the Special Olympics team in the dark unis.

edmonton poker scam

It sounds more like a David Mamet script than a Canadian news piece, but apparently a group of con artists are running a little poker scam in the Edmonton area.

During the course of the game the complainant learns that the tokens are worth real money, and that he stands to win a significant amount of cash due to a streak of good luck. Of course, the good luck turns sour and the complainant ends up losing several thousand dollars to the other players.

cash-transfer ATM

An inventor has announced his latest invention, an ATM that not only dispenses cash but accepts cash to pay for online transactions or transfer cash between people. He makes the point that in over 3/4 of the world, almost all transactions are cash-only. Link

The article makes an offhand mention that the device could be used to pay for online gambling. While that's certainly true, a device like this is not necessary to get around Visa-Mastercard-American Express-Paypal's voluntary ban of online gambling payments; there are dozens of other mediation systems that facilitate credit card payments for online gambling, and any given online gambling site usually has a link to at least one of them.

All the voluntary ban has really done is boost the revenue of offshore payment mediators, many of whom charge pretty hefty percentages on transactions, and are often in jurisdictions with questionable or absent regulation.

kitten poker

Random link of the day -- poker for kittens?!

You will need one fur lined Cat Basket, for the middle of the table, and a good selection of kittens, Kitten values are as follows.

professional video poker, anyone?

News 8 in Vegas reported a story on Monday about a professional video poker player who is now hawking classes and books about video poker:

Professional gambler Bob Dancer says he turned $6,000 into a million with just 6 months of play. At the Fiesta Rancho he's teaching others the strategy he used to cash in.

Let's take a closer look at Bob Dancer's claim anyway. First things first: the statement above is misleading. Bob Dancer's "$6,000 bankroll" is what he claims he arrived in Vegas with almost ten years ago (Link). It's almost impossible to turn $6,000 into $1m in any endeavor, including the highly lucrative field of professional video poker (sarcasm).

He claims that he and his wife won $1 million between September 2000 and March 2001. So while he made the $1m over six months, that was 6 years after he first arrived in Vegas with $6,000 and a dream. Also, does this mean that he made $1 million in profit, or that his winning hands totaled $1 million collected? It's not clear.

Let's assume it was $1 million in profit. Is this even possible? The easy answer is yes, if you're extremely lucky. It would only require a few jackpots at lucrative levels to hit $1m in profit, but you would need to be exceptionally lucky and you would never expect to have the same luck again in your life.

The harder answer is yes, if you're playing the right amount of money, in the right machines, for the right amount of time. Bob Dancer is primarily concerned with that holy grail of video poker: machines with a payout table that optimally pays out 100.76%. These are machines that, if you play perfect strategy, over time (a long time) you are going to make money at.

It's said that a professional video poker player can play around 1,000 hands per hour. If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is. It requires intense concentration to get in almost one hand every three seconds (and not many bathroom / drink breaks!).

Let's say you've found a 100.76% payout machine, and you can play perfect video poker at 1,000 hands per hour. If that is a 25 cent machine, and you play 5 credits per hand, you'll be averaging about $9.50 per hour in profit over the long run. If you are able to play this machine for 40 hours a week, 50 weeks of the year, you will make $1m in profit -- after 105,263,158 hands and 52.63 years.

If it's a $5 machine, and you play five credits per hand, you'll get to $1m much faster -- in 2.63 years. And if it's a $25 machine, you could theoretically be clearing $950 an hour -- and get to $1m in profit in just over six months.

We've made a lot of assumptions so far, about bankroll, machine availability, your playing ability, and the stakes being played. Even if these applied, there's a big obstacle to making insane bank -- your bankroll.

Video poker is not a low-risk game. It is a game with long periods of gradually losing money, punctuated by large jackpots. If you expect to hit a jackpot once every x thousand hands, it may be 2x, 3x or 20x until one actually comes, just as you may sit down and hit one in the first hour.

The Wizard of Odds has posted the best reference I've seen about bankroll size here. It correlates "Risk of Ruin" - the odds of losing your entire stake - with bankroll size.

Let's say you want to start small, at $1.25 per play, to make your $9.50 an hour playing video poker, and you want less than a 1% chance of losing all your hard-earned kwan. You'll need a bankroll of $8,810 dedicated to your "profession." That's just to get $9.50 an hour. If you found a good $125 per play machine and wanted to make your $1m in half a year, you'd need a bankroll of $881,000. Personally, if I already had almost a million dollars, a) I wouldn't be a professional video poker player, and b) I would probably want a less than 1% chance of losing every penny of it! It's also worth mentioning that if you played at that level with a bankroll of less than $132,625 you'd have worse than a 50% likelihood of going bust.

All that said, I don't know if Bob Dancer is selling snake oil or not. His columns on Video Poker actually appear to be very well written, including this one which actually covers one of the common misconceptions about bankrolls. His writings and software appear to be pretty well-regarded online. And although I doubt he's promising this, the news piece made it sound like he was teaching people how to turn $6,000 into $1m in six months, which is most certainly a pipe dream.

Being a professional video poker player appeals to a very narrow set of people, and requires a really specific type of personality and mind. As for me, I'd probably go insane (not to mention deaf and blind) if I tried to make a living by playing 8,000 hands of perfect video poker every day.

update on austin poker club

It's been a little quiet on the Austin Poker Club news front lately (previous news here and here).

I recently received an e-mail from the owner of the APC; the update is that there's nothing much new to report, except that they hope to have their court date set within the next month and he's still feeling very optimistic.

rec.gambling.poker

rec.gambling.poker used to be the best place to discuss poker online. Now it's more like bobbing for apples in a septic tank. (The best online poker discussions these days that I'm aware of are probably at either 2+2 or sometimes liveactionpoker.)

Occasionally, though, the puerile noise renders some funny (but still puerile) exchanges. Here's an example of one recent post and the first five replies:

WHO IS PHIL HELMYOUTH?>>?
IS THIS SOME NEW PLAYER? JUST SAW HIM ON ESPN.
--
he's a good father
--
He's a Bad Motha.
--
Shut Yo' mouth!
--
Shaft!
--
He can read your soul.
And he can read stories.

dallas underground poker

The latest on the radar of mainstream poker writing -- there's a good column in the latest Dallas Observer about an illegal poker game in Dallas:

If you've seen Rounders, a fine poker movie in my opinion, you probably have some romantic notion of underground card rooms--secret knocks, leggy women handing out stacks of heavy clay chips, sleek décor, mad, mobbed-up Russians, the works. That's what I had in mind, too.

This place? This place is a little different.

florida poker gets a boost

A bill just passed in Florida that allows a max bet of $2 in poker rooms, erasing the previous cap which was a max pot of $10. $2 max isn't huge, but it's a good start. Link

"Instead of a $10 pot limit, there will be a $2 bet limit with no more than three raises," Winning said. "We hope this goes through. It could pick things up. The pot could go up anywhere from $20 to $40."

Update: Tyler pointed out that not only has Jeb Bush not signed this bill yet, but he also vetoed a similar bill last year at the last minute. So no Florida poker boost yet.

Update: the bill passed.

Update: if you're looking for information on Florida poker room locations, the best info I have is here.

dream poker game

SFGate.com's Gambling Fool column this week, after a lengthy rant about cycling not being a sport, includes readers' answers to his question last week, "What's your dream poker game?" My favorite answer:

Jim G: "Let me translate your question: Who do we know who's really stupid about his or her money? So I would like Garry St. Jean at the table, along with the owner or general manager of the Portland Trailblazers, Texas Rangers, New York Mets, Baltimore Orioles, and Washington Redskins."

a wynn primer

Guardian article with a good brief history of Steve Wynn's role in the development of Vegas, his art collecting ways, and his new casino project.

By 2005, his most ambitious gamble, a $2.4bn hotel resort - with its own man-made lake and, of course, with its own Ferrari and Maserati dealerships - is due to open. Originally, it was to be named Le Reve, after one of the Picassos that Wynn and his wife own; but, as of last month, it is to be called Wynn Las Vegas, embodying a dream of a different kind.

wsop earlier tonight

Episode #3 of the World Series of Poker tonight is on one hour earlier - at 8pm Eastern / 7pm Central (i.e. it's about to start). If you missed it, don't worry, ESPN has been replaying them at least twice, on Saturdays and Mondays.

sympathy for the numbers

The Bahamas police recently held a press conference to announce a strategic plan to cripple the massive illegal numbers game in the Bahamas, which sounds as old and entrenched there as it is in many nations like the Philippines and Thailand.

This fascinating op-ed from the Nassau Guardian rabidly defends the Bahamian numbers racket as a traditional part of life there, and paints it in a human light, including some cool anecdotes about the bookies and players that populate the primitive underground lottery community.

Then there are those that the police refer to as the "kingpins." Are they a motley crew of nefarious culprits or just entrepreneurs? It's interesting that the first generation of Houses were headed by men. These were men who enjoyed gambling and sought ways to cultivate their interest while earning an income. These pioneers, not unlike their earlier counterparts were pirate like, bootleggers and they built a name and a fat bank account by offering hope to others.

They were however unlike their earlier counterparts in that they seldom dapple in drugs, prostitution or the harder social needs. They are strictly Numbers men.

Hope for them came in the form of poker, other card games and the Numbers Game. They would set up the games, manage the collections and deliver as a guarantee on the monies paid when that "number fell." they were trusted treasurers of the people's purse.

survival of the least risk-averse

There's an interesting brief piece over at SciScoop, "Playing With Poker Chips At The Dawn Of Humanity," that manages to draw parallels between the World Poker Tour, gambling behavior, and evolution -- as well as references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mario Puzo and skipping stones. Link

poker coding, anyone?

Someone on rentacoder.com is looking for an implementation of an online draw poker game. It won't be played for money - get this - it's webcam strip poker. The next killer app? Link

poker haiku

Poker-themed haiku from the shugars, the blog of an MP3.com employee about waiting to see what happens to his company, which is going through some rough times:

I wait patiently.
Hoping for good River Card.
Corporate Poker.

irish poker school opens

The Fitzwilliam Card Club in Dublin will be opening a "poker school" starting September -- 9 weeks of 90-minute classes. The class costs $200. I'll be interested to hear how the classes are. Example lesson plan:

Week 4 - Recap of Week 3
- Pot Odds v Gambling
- Trips, Straights & Flushes
- Playing a Monster
- Trapping / Slowplaying
- Sandbagging / Semi Bluffs & Bluffs

you gamble long time

Park Place Entertainment, owners of Caesar's Palace, Bally's and a number of other casinos, recently announced they're changing their name to Caesars Entertainment. Unfortunately www.caesarsentertainment.com is taken already -- by a Bangkok massage parlor! Story

Update: Rick over at thechipboard.com has this to say:

PPE is very much aware of this site (I talk to their General Counsel's office) and they are looking into this matter because not only is that Thailand based company using the Caesars name but they are also using the same graphics and fonts as Caesars casino/hotel properties and just a guess but I suspect that PPE will probably go after them for trademark infrigement.

the government made him do it?

A Canadian compulsive gambler, who stole CAD$100,000 from his government job over two years through fraud, was sentenced to 240 hours of community service and 3 years of probation, despite the Ottawa Assistant Crown attorney requesting 12-18 months of jail time.

The judge handing down the sentence essentially blamed the government for promoting gambling, thus creating compulsive gamblers and said the government has to "share some of the responsibility for creating people who fall prey to this addiction".

Which is fine, except this man's crime wasn't being a compulsive gambler. It was stealing large sums of money over an extended period of time through fraud and abuse of power. The National Post has a great op-ed on how ludicrous the opinion is.

And while Bélanger did use the example of cocaine -- which a) the government doesn't sell; and b) does actually make an addict out of everybody who uses it -- the arguments he presented would surely apply more logically, or illogically in this case, to booze.

classic moments in online poker

Classic moment in online poker #315: playing in a pot-limit Omaha tournament, one guy is all-in by the river, which gives me a weak full house. I bet at the pot, and get reraised for a huge amount by the third player. I decide to fold my hand, and he turns over an A-2, thinking we're playing OMAHA HI/LO, and loses to one pair.

bestseller lists!

I just added a brand new feature to love and casino war that I'm excited about -- bestseller lists!

In a previous post, I mentioned the popularity of some poker books on Amazon.com. To compile that list, I had to go through the books on Amazon by hand and look up their Sales Ranks.

After checking out Amazon Web Services I decided that it would be pretty cool to show a regularly updated list of these bestsellers. I started with Incutio's very elegant PHP integration. Feature creep set in and I added a little database on this site to track movement of the books, as well as tracking an approximation of how many books are sold each week. So, I present to you:

Poker Bestsellers
Blackjack Bestsellers
Vegas Bestsellers
Gambling Bestsellers

If you see any books that should be on this list, please let me know. For instance, for some reason Doyle Brunson's Super System doesn't appear in an Amazon search for "Poker" (!) so I added it manually. Also if you'd like to see bestseller lists for anything else let me know too!

These lists are now linked from the left sidebar of the site too.

brag

If you've ever wanted to try out 3-card brag, the English poker-like game depicted in "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels", you can download a version here (via Little Teapot). There's a good set of Brag rules here. I don't care much for the game compared to poker, but some people get into it.

binion's convicted killers get new trial

Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish, convicted in 2000 for the murder of Binion heir Ted Binion, got their convictions overturned this week when the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that the original judge committed errors that unfairly biased the jury. There will be a retrial.

The justices also took issue with the way the testimony of attorney James Brown was presented to jurors. In an eve-of-death phone call, Binion told Brown of his youthful girlfriend, "Take Sandy out of the will if she doesn't kill me tonight. If I'm dead you'll know what happened."

The justices said Bonaventure should have instructed jurors to consider statements only as evidence of Binion's state of mind, not as fact. "The prejudicial impact was great: The statement strongly implied Murphy killed Binion," the justices wrote.

borgata reports

Here are some early reports from visits to the Borgata, Atlantic City's newest casino:
Allan Baruz | The Illuminated Donkey | Marc Falcone of Deutsche Bank Securities | Philip K | Joe Marley

From all accounts, especially those coming in on rec.gambling.poker, the poker room is really nice, and despite some green dealers is being managed well. Looking good for the success of AC's third real poker room.

40,000 feet below binion's

Ken Goldstein has a good article about low-rolling it up in Vegas during the World Series of Poker.

For those players who can't afford the big-ticket buy-ins there are nightly 11:00 p.m. $225 no-limit Hold 'Em "consolation" events as well as smaller, one-table "satellite" tournaments to raise bucks for the big ones.

And then there was us.

pennsylvania pushing lottery tickets as incentives

In the latest from the front lines of ridiculous gambling promotion by states, the PA government is trying to convince companies to give out lottery tickets as employee incentives. Typically rational indictment of state lotteries from the Motley Fool:

Lottery tickets typically have a payout rate of 50 cents per dollar spent, which means that they are not only among the worst gambling prospects around; they also offer companies one of the worst investing payoffs. This may be exciting and fun for employees, but does that actually double the value of the tickets? We doubt it.

harry s. truman, poker player

I found this great article on Harry S. Truman's poker-playing ways. It includes this story about when Winston Churchill joined in a game in 1946 right before Churchill gave his famous "Iron Curtain" speech:

As the game progressed, though, Churchill lost steadily, and his stack of chips dwindled. After about an hour of this disastrous play, Churchill left the room for a moment. Truman told his companions that they would have to let up some. "But, Boss, this guy's a pigeon" one of the players, Harry Vaughan, burst out. "If you want us to play our best poker for the nation's honor, we'll have this guy's pants before the evening is over."

The tour of Truman's "Little White House" in Key West, FL includes a view of the presidential poker table, a dining table whose top comes off to reveal a nice poker table beneath. Link

nostalgic story

Harry Bekkar tells a fun little story about strip poker, Jean Harlow and a man in a gray flannel suit in 1936. Link

orleans open

Just got back from the Orleans Open in Vegas this weekend. Wow, what a tournament! The limit hold'em on Saturday got 1,166 players. That's a record, and for the first time in Orleans Open history they actually had to turn away players!

Unfortunately, I didn't make the money. I busted out with about 330 players remaining. I was pretty happy with my performance, but got crippled in the fourth hour when I got outdrawn when I played top pair. It happens.

For those of you who like math, 1,166 seems like an odd number for a capped poker tournament, right? Well they play 11-handed tables in this event. As far as I can tell it didn't change the dynamic too much at the tables I was on.

What would be a trip report without some poker hands?

Hand 1: single table satellite, second hand. Blinds are $10 & $15, I have $500. I am dealt pocket 5's in mid-position, and bring it in for $60. Fold around to the button, who raises another $45. Fold to me, and I call. The flop comes 5-7-8 rainbow. I go all in for about $400 with my trips, am called, and opponent flips over AA. My hand holds up and I double up (ended up coming second and got an $80 booby prize). This hand is an example of why not to underplay AA pre-flop. I would have raised at least $100-200 in his position.

The most interesting hands of the weekend came when I played in an absolutely amazing $15-30 game at the Bellagio on Sunday. This was a loose game, less aggressive than average for $15-30. About 40% of pots were unraised pre-flop and had 6 or more callers. 40% had a single raise and typically 3-6 callers. And 20% had more than one raise, less than 3 callers, or were won before the flop. Almost all hands that had a flop went to the river. Can you say wow? I only played in it for four hours because my flight was leaving, which needless to say I was not happy about! Still, I walked away +$500 which was nice.

Example hand: I play QQ in middle position for a raise and get 4 callers. Flop is Q78 rainbow. It's capped on the flop, I raise on the turn and and get three callers. Blank comes on the river, I bet and all of them call. They turn over middle pair, bottom pair, and pocket 6's and I scoop a huge pot.

Most of my winning hands were this straightforward. But this pair of losing hands still has me kicking myself.

First hand: I have KK in middle position. One caller to me, I raise, the button calls, and the big blind and the original caller calls. The player on the button was the only good player at the table (other than me). He had played straightforward solid poker. I had seen him raise with nothing less than TT, and if he played past the flop he rarely lost. Not too creative but pretty profitable in this game. At least, I thought not too creative until this hand.

The flop came AT3 rainbow. Check-check to me, I bet, and this guy on the button raised. The two players to my right folded, and I called time. After considering the hand, I couldn't think of any hand he could have other than Ax (probably suited, or AT or above) or maybe TT. I folded, and he flipped up pocket Q's! I kicked myself but would not play that hand differently unless I really knew my opponent and put him on a bluff. But this guy, who as far as I could tell had been playing really straightforward best-hand-wins poker totally blew my mind here.

About half an hour later, I got dealt KK again, again in middle position. Two callers to me, and I raised it up. There's one caller to my left, and then the same guy is on the button, again, and this time reraises. The blinds fold, the two guys on my right call, I call, as does the one caller on my left. The flop comes Q73 rainbow. The first player bets, next calls, I raise, then a call, then my nemesis on the button reraises. Two calls to my right, and I call time. Playing the hand back, and the other hands the guy has played, I honestly couldn't put him on any hand other than QQ or AA. There were significant differences between this situation and the last one; more callers, he reraised preflop this time (something he rarely did), and the one spot in his game I thought was a little weak was that he tended to underplay top pair so I had a tough time thinking he had AQ in this situation.

But I had enough confusion in my mind from the earlier hand, so I called his reraise and called down to the end for two more bets. If the earlier hand hadn't happened I definitely would have tossed here, that's how strong my read on this guy had been, but that one play put me so much in doubt I didn't trust my instinct on him. It would have saved me $75, because I called a total of three bets to see QQ.

Those two hands are the most outplayed I've felt at any poker table for at least 6 years. That includes three WSOP events. A big call, but I so rarely have such a strong feeling about a laydown and then see a lesser hand take it down. Really it was that first hand where I was outplayed, and led me to make those poor calls on the later hand. But outside of that one guy, I was happy with my play and did walk away a pretty good winner on the session. Now if only I hadn't taught my friend to play blackjack and craps on Friday night, I would have been up for the trip :)

As an aside, I heard this song on the radio on the way to the airport. I had never noticed the lyrics before, but they were rather appropriate...

Now you swear and kick and beg us
That you're not a gamblin' man
Then you find you're back in Vegas
With a handle in your hand
Your black cards can make you money
So you hide them when you're able
In the land of milk and honey
You must put them on the table

arrrr!

In honor of this weekend, when I'll be in Vegas playing in the Orleans Open and staying at the strip's greatest of pirate hotels...

"The Barbary Coast," wrote Benjamin Estelle Lloyd in his 1878 chronicle, Lights and Shades of San Francisco, "is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where bleary-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs, and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also."

poker blogchatter

Wow, that NYT article on poker and AI has generated a good amount of blog chatter (for poker). Here's a brief survey of the posts out there from the last day.

Commentary/Discussion:
Crooked Timber | Slashdot | Alex Jones | Techdirt | Idler Yet

Quick Mentions:
R Perl | Stare | geeknews.net | The Sound and Fury | Mike's Quicklinks | As I Please | seattlepi.com | Steve's No Direction Home Page | Magnetbox | Misanthropyst | ktheory | FactoVision | dangerousmeta | A Complete Waste of Time | Aula | Stupidus | Newmark's Door | Pathologically Polymathic | Sampler | Complexity Digest | Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends

I guess I'm surprised that this article has generated apparently more interest than Moneymaker's win itself, but it's a well-written article and is one of the first I've seen to draw the concrete link between computer simulation and practice and big-money results in real life.

the best game in town

This post comes from guest blogger Neil, my good friend and recent inductee to the world of blogging. Thanks Neil!

How excited would you be about a lottery that paid out more money than it took in and in which your ticket is re-drawn every month? But wait there's more, for your $1^* ticket you can win up to $1 million each month or lots of smaller prizes and the winnings are tax free. As if that wasn't enough, you can take your original dollar back whenever you want -- and all this is guaranteed by the government.

No way, you say! Well check out UK Premium Bonds (Link). The monthly prize pool gives you odds of 30,000 to 1 of winning a prize between $50 and $1 million.

The prize pool is determined by the effective interest rate on the bonds, currently 2.25% per year. All of the interest is divided into three prize pools, Higher, Medium and Lower. The lower band gets 90% of the money and the other two get 5% each. The higher band has one prize of $1 million and the rest of the 5% is divided between $100k, $50k, $25k, $10k and $5k prizes. The next 5% is divided between $1k and $500 prizes. The final 90% is divided between $100 and $50 prizes.

When you buy your Premium Bond it is given a serial number. ERNIE (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment) draws out the numbers (enough to have 1 prize for every 30k bonds) and the prizes are allocated to these numbers. The first number selected by ERNIE wins the million, the next $100k, and so on.

At an annual expected value of $1.0225 per dollar invested, this seems like the best bet in the world. Of course there are two big reasons why it isn't. Each month you have less than a 1 in 19.5 billion chance of winning $1 million per dollar invested, so effectively you are only receiving volatile interest payments. As your returns are more risky from an investment (rather than gambling) point of view, you should expect higher returns. That is why people invest in stocks rather than bonds -- higher volatility but higher returns. $1 invested in 1801 would have returned $1,070 if in bonds or $462,502 in the stock market (Link). But with Premium Bonds, you receive lower returns and higher volatility. You could receive 3.8% in another government account (also tax free) and this interest is guaranteed.

I know a couple of people that have these bonds, one wins often and the other hasn't won in 10 years. On average if you invest the entire $30k maximum you should expect to win once a month. I would be excited to see some company issue 5% corporate bonds that paid interest in this manner, I'm sure they would have no trouble selling them.

Anyway if I could go to Vegas, pay once to play roulette and every 5 minutes I got to bet on a very large roulette table (maybe one with 30,000 numbers) I'd be pretty happy. Especially if I could take my chip off at any time and