In Phil Hellmuth's book, Play Poker Like the Pros, Hellmuth writes about a player he knew who would sit down at an $80-160 hold'em game, and proceed to play every hand blind for an entire round (10 hands), betting or raising the max every time it got to him.

Hellmuth uses it as an example of how to loosen up a table, and although he doesn't come out and recommend it, seems to suggest it as a possible strategy. He implies that it was worth it for the guy, because he got almost unlimited action for the rest of the night and it would cover the "$3500" (according to Hellmuth) it cost him to do this.

I looked at that number and immediately thought, it would cost you WAY more than that to play that strategy. This is a matter dear to my heart, because I am known to play blind from time to time. (Side stories to follow.)

Playing blind can be a good way to loosen up a tight table, but if you played blind as described every time you sat down, you would be looking at a costly proposition.

At an 80-160 game, assuming a full 10-player table, an average of 3 bets/round (not quite capped but close due to your maniac play), 4 players/hand, and you (the blind maniac) in ten hands in a row, and winning on average one of those hands, your net would be -$8,640! That's 54 big bets which would take a LOT of action to recover from. If you don't win one hand, you lose $14,400 or 90 big bets!

So, I can heartily recommend not taking Phil Hellmuth's friend's lead and capping every time you sit down, blind, for an entire round.

As I alluded to, however, I have had my moments in the sun playing blind. Here are my two greatest playing blind stories:

$1-2 pot-limit hold'em home game in Austin, about three years ago. I had been developing a healthy rivalry with an up-and-coming player in the game, let's call him BJ. In one particular hand, I got up to go to the kitchen for some refreshments but got dealt in. I was standing in the kitchen and someone shouted that it was $10 to go. I hadn't seen my cards, and yelled out "call". On the flop, it was just me and BJ heads up. I remained in the kitchen and was first to go. I yelled out "pot" to make it about $25. I heard BJ say "repot", raising it up to about $100.

At this point I decided it was probably prudent to come back to the table and actually look at my cards. I walked back and saw the flop was 3-4-5 rainbow. I decided that if I had any kind of hand, including two biggies, I was coming back over the top. I looked at my cards very quickly and saw an absolute angel: 6-7 offsuit for the nut straight! I instantly repotted it all-in, and BJ instantly called me and about died when he flipped up K-K and I flipped up the stone-cold nuts. I think that hand put him on tilt for about three months :)

Second story: I was in Vegas about two years ago and had been cavorting around, doing my best to exploit the casinos' free drink policy. I decided maybe it was a good time for some low-roller poker action. I was in the Luxor, so went to their tiny poker "room" (4 tables with a rail around them) and asked for a $4-8 seat. There was a huge list, and I didn't want to go to another casino, so I decided to REALLY low-roll and play the worst poker game in history, $1-5 seven-card stud.

$1-5 seven-card stud attracts a rather unique brand of players, mostly the 70+ set who like to bet $1 or $2 a hand and sit around smoking Lucky Strike unfiltereds and talking about game shows. I find it amusing, when no other tables are open, to sit down and absolutely jam the pot while I wait for a table.

I sat down, ordered a double shot of vodka, and declared my intention to play the first hand blind as my introduction to the game. I raised $5 on the open, which instantly got most of the table to fold, probably without even looking at their cards. I ended up heads-up against a gentleman who clearly thought he was going to outplay me, and in his defense probably was the best $1-5 seven-card stud player at the table (a very dubious honor). I jammed it the whole way, managed to get another shot in, and at the end flipped up my hand and was pleased to see a full house.

I then declared I would play the next hand blind also, to give him a chance to win back his money. At the end, against two opponents, jammed the whole way, I flipped up a 6-card straight and took down the pot again. I ordered another shot and decided that I was having a very good time playing blind, and I didn't care if I didn't keep winning, I was going to play every hand blind. Even if I lost it was worth it just to see the expressions on the other player's faces :)

I ended up playing $1-5 seven-card stud, completely blind, doing shots of vodka and toasting my opponents, for almost an hour. It was the most fun I've ever had playing $1-5, and maybe ever in poker. I didn't even lose -- I ended up +$125. That's 25 big bets, my friend!

The best part was absolutely putting the rest of the table on tilt, including clearing 5 of the original players from when I sat down -- I busted 2 of them out, and 3 left out of rage or frustration.

What's the moral of the story? Perhaps you can play blind and win blind sometimes, but you can't play blind and win blind all the time.

Nick Leeson, the trader who notoriously lost $100m on the Singapore foreign exchange in one day, has been hired as a celebrity host by celebpoker.com, a new online poker room. They hired him to host online games because of his "reputation as the world's biggest gambler with a knack for losing money". Link

Several months ago, I posted an entry about the odds of getting a 7-10 split in bowling, based on a promotion that SCA Promotions offered.

I recently got a comment on the post that pointed out some of the math in the post was flawed. I posted an update to it; it's an interesting post and worth a read if you did not read it back in April. Link

New Jersey has sued ten online gambling sites to get them to stop taking bets from New Jersey residents. Two sports betting sites (not named in this article) have already settled and agreed to bar NJ residents from using their sites. Link

I expect that unless the federal government starts pursuing offshore gambling operations, state enforcement or prosecution of offshore gambling sites will be limited to states which already have a strong vested stake in domestic gambling, like New Jersey and Nevada.

The CourierPost has another article about the rising popularity of poker. The article includes some good financial facts from the Atlantic City poker rooms:

Poker revenue rose 5 percent from August 2002 to August 2003 - from $3 million to $3.14 million - at Bally's, Harrah's, Tropicana and Trump Taj Mahal. But new card rooms at the Borgata and Sands raised total revenues to more than $3.9 million, putting the year's overall gain at about 30 percent.

Link

The World Poker Tour has announced that it will be running a special "Ladies Night" event, airing on the Travel Channel on December 10 from 9-11pm ET.

The player roster on World Poker Tour Ladies Night includes six women, five of whom have competed in WPT events: Annie Duke, a professional poker player who is studying for her Ph.D. and is a mother of four; Maureen "Mo" Feduniak, a grandmother who began playing poker just nine years ago; Cyclona "Clonie" Gowen, who finished 10th in the World Poker Tour Costa Rica Classic during season one; Jennifer Harman, widely considered the best female poker player -- if not poker player in the world; Kathy Liebert, a no-nonsense professional poker player who, among her many victories, has a million dollar poker tournament payout under her belt; and first time WPT finalist, Evelyn Ng, a former blackjack and poker dealer who plays poker five days a week for six hours or more each day. Both Duke and Harman are former World Champions.

Link

If you live in the DFW area, you may be interested in the Dallas Poker Forum. It's a new discussion site for players in the DFW area to talk about poker, hook up for games, etc. Link

The weekend Las Vegas Review-Journal ran yet another article on the surge in poker's popularity, focusing on the WPT and WSOP broadcasts.

"It's absolutely incredible," said Doug Dalton, MGM Mirage's poker operations director. "The surge in interest is unbelievable. It's boosting play on Internet sites, but also in live card rooms and especially in tournaments."

Link

The Game Show Network has announced that it will be running a "World Series of Blackjack" next year!

"The World Series of Blackjack" will feature top blackjack players among the participants in a tournament offering $250,000 in prize money, the channel said Wednesday. The top prize will be more than $100,000.

Link

Movie trivia: in the opening scene of Kill Bill, several paintings in Vivica Fox's character's home are destroyed in the knife-fight between her and Uma Thurman. One of them is the painting "Cowboy Poker" by Rod Grier (Pam Grier's brother), which features "an ethnic group of cowboys playing a hot hand of poker". Prints and the original are available at his website. Unfortunately, they are depicted each holding a single card, there are no chips or money on the table, and 3 of the 4 of them have an ace -- not exactly an accurate poker game, but nevertheless some interesting trivia. Link (via manhunt.com)

Greg Costikyan wrote an interesting article about chess and its complexities. Although chess in some ways is the antithesis of poker, in that it has an abject lack of chance or randomness during play, I've found that a lot of poker players enjoy chess. I enjoy analyzing chess situations in a similar way to how I enjoy analyzing poker situations; although the possible outcomes from a position are not reliant on chance as they are in poker, anticipating which of the moves is most likely by your opponent "feels" similar to assessing probabilities in poker to me.

In any event, the article is at least a good introduction to Costikyan's excellent weblog on games and game design.

...games of this type rely on emergent complexity--complicated strategies deriving from simple rules sets. And because the whole point of emergent complexity is that outcomes cannot readily be grasped from initial conditions, it's hard to derive a set of rules that create emergent complexity--at least at anything like the depth that Chess offers.

Link

Dallas channel 11 ran a story on the "legally questionable" poker games going on in Dallas.

Chip says there are at least 30 groups in the area hosting high stakes games. Law enforcement sources back up that information and claim they' often see more than a hundred thousand dollars exchanging hands at just one place, in just one night.

Link (via The Scrolldown)

Three casinos in Detroit have been sued by problem gamblers who claim they asked to be barred from the casinos but were not, and subsequently lost a lot of money. Link

It will be interesting to see where the suit goes. It's not clear that the casinos are liable if they don't perfectly enforce the voluntary ban program, but if they were shown to have known that these people were supposed to be barred and let them in anyway they may be in at least a little bit of trouble.

There was a brief article in the Chicago Sun-Times that made a comparison of rock-paper-scissors to poker, a comparison rarely made in articles about RPS which usually treat the game as a joke.

Going to the International World Rock Paper Scissors Championship in Toronto was like going to the World Series of Poker for Mark Greenberg of Buffalo Grove.

"It's not just luck; you need to read your opponent and call their bluffs," said Greenberg, 26, one of seven Illinoisans who traveled to Canada to compete in the championship last weekend.

Link

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