Shabbir's Diary

My best hand!

I buy a lot of poker books, as you can tell from my Amazon wishlist.  I actually often buy books that are ahead of where I am in poker skills.  I don't mean that I don't understand them.  On an intellectual level I do.  But experience counts for a lot in poker.  And for me, not until I've actually physically experienced the event that I'm reading about does it really click.

And so it was that I had my best hand this weekend at the Big Game.  I call it the best not because I won the most money, but because I think I played it really well, applying lessons I've learned from book study into a live game.

The game was $2/$5 NL hold'em, three-handed.  I'm sitting on a stack of about $1,000, and Hip Hop Guy on my left has about $600.  I'm on the button and he's the small blind.  I'm first to act and make it $15 to go.  Hip Hop Guy calls and the big blind folds.  I've got Ace-Six unsuited.

The flop comes Ace-Queen-Two, all different suits.  If I've got the only Ace I'm doing pretty well.  I bet out $20 and Hip Hop Guy thinks for a moment and calls.  I realize he's probably got an Ace with an unpaired kicker just like me.

The dealer puts out the fourth card, a two, which pairs the twos on the board.  I think about it for a second and realize my Six kicker won't play if we both have Aces.  Then I realize that unless he has a King, Queen, or Two, neither will his!  If my read is right, we're headed to a chopped pot.  So, armed with the knowledge that I've got a hand that will at least chop, I decide to bet big to see if I can steal.  I bet $60 expecting to fold if I get re-raised.  Hip Hop Guy looks at his cards wistfully and tosses them.  He might have had a Queen, he might have had an Ace, but he folded either way.

The Two is what many poker authors call a "hidden out".  It's a card which basically counterfeits the kicker card in both hands without actually matching any card in either hand.  I've read about it, but this is the first time I've actively noticed and exploited it.

Sadly, I didn't get to crow about it at the table, so only you will know.

ABC poker wins again

I babysat for Sarah and one of her fellow mom drinking buddies this weekend and then after they got home, I hit the Big Game slightly before midnight.  I arrived to a table of six morose people playing $2/$5 No limit Hold'em, maximum buyin $1,000.  Two guys were racking up around $5-6,000 in chips and the rest of the table looked entirely morose as they were leaving.  All night these players had been dominating the table apparently.  When one had accumulated $2,000 or so, he started simply making bets so big nobody could stand them.  Slowly he chipped away at everyone's stack.  Occasionally someone would make a stand and they'd discover he had a great hand. 

After a while, he just started raising every pot to $25, and few players, if any, had the ability to make a stand.  When one of the guys racked up his $4,000+ and left, I thought the rest of them were going to cry.

And so I sat down to a table of emotionally scarred players with my $500 in chips.  The five of us started playing and they were thrilled to discover I wasn't a maniac.  In order around the table were four players of wildly different styles.  To my left was hip-hop guy, who's a terrible poker player whom I could often push out of a pot.  He's trying to learn by playing cards instead of playing and studying

To his left was Maniac Recruiter Guy.  He'd dropped $1,500 playing against the lunatic who just left, and still had about $700 left.  To his left was Government Contractor Construction Guy, who bluffs a lot.  And to his left was Stapler Rock Guy, who's dangerous when he has a good hand.

Maniac Recruiter Guy was tilted all evening from dropping $1,500 to the Maniac earlier.  It's not the money that bothers him, it's the fact that he lost it in a game against someone else.  He's an entrepreneur who sold his company a few years ago and has more money than he'll ever spend.

He, like most poker players, are extremely competitive and losing the money is not nearly as important as losing a hand to someone else and being shown that they played poorly.

Maniac Recruiter Guy and I got into a hand when I had Ace-Queen of clubs and he had King clubs, Jack of diamonds.  The flop came 3 diamonds, 4 diamonds, and King hearts.  Maniac Guy bet $25 and I raised to $100.  He thought for a second and then called.  The turn came the 8 of diamonds and the whole table considered the flush.  Maniac Recruiter Guy thought and checked.  I quickly bet $300 to try and push him out of the pot.

Maniac Recruiter Guy went deep into the tank to think.  He sat and moved his two hole cards, bottom to top, one at a time.  Bottom card pulled out and put on top.  Over and over again. Stapler Rock Guy said, "Hey, you're showing your cards."

I believed I saw the King of diamonds, and I told him so.  "Hey, I can't be deceitful, my integrity requires that I tell you.  But I'd be happy if you called."

He thought for a long time, and then said, "I don't have the King of diamonds, but I do have a diamond."  And then he folded.  I told him I had the Ace-queen of clubs and was on a pure bluff and  he proceeded to tilt badly for the next hour.  Sadly, my bluff taught him to copy my move, and every time I entered a pot with him, he bullied me out of it.  He took so many $75 pots with $700 bets that I just tightened up and quit playing anything out of position against him.

After about 90 minutes I was dealt a pair of jacks.  I limped into the pot with Maniac Recruiter Guy and Stapler Rock Guy.  The flop came J-4-3, all different suits.  I hit my set!  I was out of position, with the pot at $15, I bet $15.  Maniac Recruiter Guy called, and Stapler Rock Guy folded.

The turn came a queen, making the board J-3-4-Q and I bet $50.  Maniac Recruiter Guy thought for a second and then said "all in".  He had bet about $800.  I had $500-$600 left.  I thought about whether or not he would have played a pair of queens like that, which would have given him a high set of queens, and assumed no.  I also re-read the board, and found that he couldn't have a flush or a straight.  He either has a lower set or two pair or heaven forbid, a draw.  Possibly and overpair, but he would have raised that before the flop.

I knew I had the best hand, and I said, "I call, I hope you have queens."  He turned over Queen-Four to show that he had two pair.  He was dead unless the final card was a queen.  It was not, it was a three, making me a full house and him three pair.  I threw $15 to the dealer and asked her to count my chips carefully while I took a walk around the room.  I didn't really want to sit there and watch him count out my chips.

When I came back the club owner and the dealer had carefully stacked about $1,150 in chips in front of me.  Maniac Recruiter Guy had taken his last $125 and left for the night.  I sat back down and pondered playing this game three handed.

We played three handed for a while and the two remaining players ran over me with bluffs and semi-bluffs.  I dropped about $200 and then the owner closed for the night.  I cashed out my largest win ever and hitched a ride home.

As he counted out my twenties, the owner said, "I'm really sorry you had such a bad night, Shabbir."

Heh.  I'll be back to the Big Game again.

Wait, a leak in my game!

I seem to have developed a leak in my game.  I realized it when I made the same mistake both in live poker and online in corresponding No limit cash games.

The leak is that I seem to be assuming people are bluffing the flush on the river.  A quiet better who calls me on every street will wake up on the river when the flush card comes and bet at me.  Like a fish, I call the bet because my advanced poker skills have told me he's bluffing the flush.

Honestly, I'm just outsmarting myself.  I need to stick to ABC poker and play a straight game.

Honestly, the Palm is dead, they just don't know it yet.

Although I will never write a history of cellphone innovation, 2005-2007 will mark the year that Microsoft came into a dominant space in the market.  Was it something Microsoft had done?  Did their marketing team figure out the secret to getting people to buy Windows mobile based phones?  Did a competitor stumble? 

Nope, none of these things.  The reason Microsoft will really start to turn the screws to Palm this year is due to the presence of QWERTY keyboard on mobile handsets.  And unless RIM starts to do something else innovative, they're going to find themselves digging a grave next to Palm.

Let's review mobile handset history:

In the beginning was the cell phone and e-mail, and the two never met.  Many tried, but the lack of a keyboard made the experience frustrating.

Then came the Blackberry, and you could credibly send and receive a lot of e-mail on it.  And then it became a phone.  You could still get e-mail on other devices but without a quality full QWERTY keyboard, you were slower than a Blackberry user.

Then came the Treo, and people had an alternative to the Blackberry.  It ran an actually useful operating system, more useful than the Blackberry, and so there was a chance you could find software for it that didn't even exist for the Blackberry.

All this time there was Windows Mobile, running on phones out there, very few with QWERTY keyboards.  The legions of businesspeople with Microsoft Exchange servers went and bought truckloads of Blackberries because frankly, they worked well and there simply weren't many alternatives that did a good job.

Now a quick glance across the carriers shows a wide variety of QWERTY phones, most of them running Windows Mobile.  There will be the most number of developers (and therefore products) for Windows, with the second number for Palm, and the least for Blackberries.

As the QWERTY Windows Mobile handsets flood the market and Microsoft releases direct-to-cellphone Microsoft Exchange synchronization, the Blackberry will become an also-ran.  They'll simply be a choice among a dozen cellphones that do e-mail.  I don't think the "magical scroll button" will save the device when there are so many other options.  And if Microsoft wants to, they can make Windows Mobile Exchange more featureful and lock out Blackberry's Exchange software.

Where is Palm in all of this?  The OS has little value left, and Treo's handsets are going to have to compete with everyone else's and become a commodity.  And they're LifeDrive?  Cool idea, but where's the fucking keyboard?

Honestly, this is the end for them.  Rim had better come up with something quick, or they're on the way out too in the next three years.

Nats beats Astros, 8-5

So I played hooky yesterday and saw game 3 of the 4 game series against the Astros at RFK.  It's a 1:05pm game and was supposed to be a date for Sarah and I, but she got a couple of big deals in at work and so I went alone rather than mope around at work about getting stood up.

It was a pretty good game.  To judge it from the Nats own coverage (see "Robinson emotional following win") you'd think that it was all about the homers and the fact that it took seven stolen bases to finally have Robinson pull the catcher out of the game. 

Honestly, there were three key moments in the game which are underappreciated.  The first two were the left and center fielders both making dead-run, tip-of-glove catches that would have had game-changing consequences had they missed.  Neither one was a given.  The last was a very tense moment when Rauch was on the mound for the Nats, and got himself in a hole when the Astros loaded the bases without making a single out.  With a crowd very worried about Rauch giving away their lead, he managed to retire the next three batters with a strikeout, a pop fly, and a soft hit that he caught himself right from the mound.

It was frankly the Nats game to lose, but they held on and played some great ball, so I got to go home happy.

"The Professor, The Banker, and the Suicide King" by Michael Craig

Katie picked this up for me for my birthday and I read it in 48 hours flat.  It's the story of a banker from Texas, Andy Beal, and how he discovered poker.  The story is interesting because Andy is a billionaire, and instead of working up through limits, he decided to simply study one kind of difficult poker and then challenge the world's best pros at stakes they weren't comfortable playing at.

After an initial foray to Vegas where he discovered the game, Andy Beal sat down and applied all the study he could to learning heads up Texas Hold'em.  In heads up, you are playing against only one other person.  It's as much a game of psychology as anything else, and more than in any other form of poker, the cards can matter a lot if the players are evenly matched.

He setup a private poker room in his business and brought dozens of amateur and expert players to Texas to help him hone his strategy.  He returned several times to Vegas, playing for stakes that began at $10,000/$20,000 limit hold'em and finally up to $100,000/$200,000.  That means that every pot was probably going to be a million dollars.

In that final game, the group of pros that took him on (no one player had enough money) pooled $10 million and played one at a time from a common bankroll against Andy. 

Pick up the book, it's well worth a read.

Not just pride, but unchecked hostility goeth before the fall.

I'm usually very good with vendors, but yesterday I confess that I lost it.  A serious problem was escalated to a vendor manager and wasn't noticed because this person was training a new staffer all day Monday.  Along with a poorly placed "fuck" in the conversation, I suggested that perhaps new employee training ought to include teaching new staff how to appropriately be responsive to customer issues in a timely manner.

Of course the single curse undermined my credibility, which is something my business partner Dan has long tried to teach me.  You curse intentionally, and never wantonly.  I picked the wrong person to curse at and apparently made this person cry.  I apologized of course, but my problem is getting handled very attentively. 

Today I caught myself writing a page long e-mail explaining to someone just how close they came to making a grievous error, cc'ed to his managers with a seriously angry tone.  Before I sent it, I carefully re-read his e-mail.  He was just asking a question, not making a dangerous change to our environment.  I shortened it up and asked him to call me.  We had a very easy conversation where I answered his question and we parted happily.

Clearly I'm walking around half-cocked, though I'm not sure why.  I'm going to fling $900 in poker chips around this evening, so I hope I get it out of my system before that ends up sucking my money.

[Update: my hostility was in check, and I neither made nor lost any significant money tonight at the Big Game.]

Google Pay Per Click ads

People are slagging on the Google Pay Per Click video ads, and they're not really even out already.  I'll say this though, everyone that works in interactive has Google to thank for moving a $1billion a year in advertising off television and onto the web.  You ought to be a little more supportive of new endeavors, you pack of traitorous jackals.

That being said, the critique I cite has a most interesting observation.  We all know it to be true, but it's summed up pretty well, and helps you understand why Google video is well-positioned.

[..] people don’t want to click on video ads. They don’t want to watch this stuff at all, really. And if a company comes up with a really cool ad, like Honda’s wonderful “Cog” ad, it’ll spread virally. They don’t need to pay users to watch it.

Too true, too true.

Sen. John Edwards talking about student loan programs

Sarah and I were riding home the other day and heard Sen. John Edwards speaking at a commencement ceremony.  The date wasn't clear, and so it could have been in the middle of the last campaign, or it could have been yesterday.  I believe he was in North Carolina though.

The contrast in rhetoric in his speech was so striking compared to what comes from the Republican side of the aisle.  Edwards really called it out when he said that "none of us gets here on our own".  He cited student loan programs as an example of the fact that even the most well-heeled of us tends to intersect with government programs at this point.  Public schools are another example.  As someone who had a huge amount of student loans, and was dismayed to see the Republicans cut the budgets recently, it really spoke to me.

Given the partisan nature of the country, if you traditionally vote Democratic, I suppose you tuned out long ago.  But if you still are paying attention, I recommend you take some time to listen to Edwards' podcast with his wife at his website.  Edwards and his wife both speak thoughtfully for twenty minutes on energy and foreign policy.  Can you imagine what it would like to have a President who could actually hold his own on such a discussion?  Bush certainly couldn't, though his father could.  And of course Clinton's downfall is that he could do this too, but he'd call you at 4am right after he finished a 300 page policy paper to discuss it with you.

I think it would be a huge improvement if all our Presidential canddates were smart enough to be able to yap on a microphone without a teleprompter for twenty minutes.

Darth Vader telling the Emperor the Death Star is destroyed