Shabbir's Diary

Recruiting players for the Big Game

I hit the Big Game last night for a 5 hour stint and brought along two guys: my old poker buddy Chris and a coworker Chad who works at one of our office outside DC.  Despite some drama last week involving a Big Game employee skipping town and some missing money, the game went off without a hitch, and fielded two tables.  I got lucky and drew the table of less experienced, though still dangerous players.

I did well, clearing $350 profit, and am fortunate enough that I've now got a poker colleague (Chris) that comes regularly to this game that I can discuss hands and players with.  As I mentioned before, the long-time profiling of players has become my new area of poker improvement, and so now Chris and I can compare notes on players.

Once again, I found myself doubling my $300 stack of chips to $600 with a couple of big hands, and then being stuck, unable to break through $700.  This happens to me all the time, and I have to wonder, "Do I play differently with $600 in front of me?"  Or do people play differently at me when I'm that size?  They certainly play differently if I'm short-stacked, calling me more often.  In fact if you look at the math at this game, my standard deviation from my $300 starting stack is $297, indicating that I either double or lose my money every session.

The two hands that gave me that stack were unfortunately played against two friends.  In one, I called Ace-Four of hearts while my friend limped in with two kings.  I flopped a made straight, an Ace high flush draw and a straight flush draw when the flop came 235 with two hearts.  The turn came an Ace, and the river came the ten of hearts, giving me the nuts.

I then picked up King-Jack offsuit out of position and ended up playing it against Chris who was holding Queen-Ten.  Chris is pretty tight and the flop came King-Jack-blank.  I bet $15 into an $8 pot, and he raised it to $35.  I made it $100 to go and he called.  This rattled me so bad that when the turn came a blank, I checked, thinking I could call if he bet into me, but not really being wild about paying off a set.

Of course, by checking I made the obvious mistake of giving him a free card, something I spent the rest of the night beating myself up about.

The river came a blank and I took down the $200 pot with my King-Jack.  I was embarassed to have given him a free card.  Afterwards we even ran the hands through a poker calculator before I would believe that he called with odds on the flop.  The Queen-Ten was a 30%-70% underdog to hit its straight, and with the pot laying him just over 2-to-1 to call my raise, he had enough odds to call on the flop, and since I didn't bet the turn, infinite odds to check.  I thought it was a little thin, with no positive expected value, but it's not a bad play.  And he totally manipulated me into doing what he wanted, so it's hard to fault the strategy.

Afterwards Chris said, "Would you pay $100 to draw to that straight?"  "No", I said, "but then I'm not a big fan of the high variance game."   

I'm looking forward to reviewing my player profiling notes this weekend with Chris.

New comic: DMZ

I frequent the new comic book store in Tenleytown, Fantom Comics, next to the Container Store and the Best Buy.  The owner is starting to know my tastes, and his recommendations are increasingly accurate.

His latest recommendation is "DMZ", from Vertigo.  Knowing my love of post-apocalyptic earth, I suppose you're not surprised to find out that it's the story of the US after a modern civil war after New Jersey secedes from the United States.  Manhattan becomes the demilitarized zone contested by both the US Army and the Free States of New Jersey and others. In a weird twist of fate, a photographers assistant on assignment ends up trapped in Manhattan.  He's the only member of his news team left alive, and he explores the island and it's inhabitants through the pages of the comic.

Artists collectives with guns, zookeepers in Central Park with land mine fields, it's all there.  Darkly funny in its commentary on our nation's new relationship with war, it's an excellent read.

Allow me to state the obvious.

I've been at a plateau for a while in my poker career.  I felt I just couldn't get past a certain level of play, and the only way I could get any better was to play a very tight game, and even then I felt like I was being slung around by the statistics of the game.  Get good cards, I win money.  Get poor cards, lose money.  I have studied the techniques of drawing, and identified betting patterns in a hand to try and tell if I was beat when I didn't have the nuts.  However I felt like I really was strongest in my hand selection.  I knew this wasn't enough.

Right about the time I was struggling with this, I received Matt Matros book, the Making Of A Poker Player as a Father's Day gift.  Something clicked as I read it, and I knew that my game had topped out.  Somehow I knew that what I needed was to establish long-term profiles of players I was playing against,  and to use that knowledge against them.  I think it was Matros' repeated use of the player profile in his play.  "He could raise with anything down to 88 here" and other profile phrases really drove the point home that this gave him an edge.

I suddenly realized that this is where I was.  I had reached that level of my poker education where I couldn't advance without learning the skill of player profiling.  I don't mean simple things like, "is he aggressive?" or "is he passive?", but observations like, "He bets second pair on the flop in late position."

I put down the book and fired up the computer, bringing up one of the many online sites where I had a few hundred dollars deposited.  I sat down at $100 buyin no limit hold'em table and opened a notepad window for each of the 5 other players at my table.  I watched them play, noted which players seemed to check too much, which players seemed to call me down with anything, and which players would bet anything. 

My table had 4 players who were passive in various ways.  I made three kinds of notes about each of them. 

1. With what hands do they raise?  Ace with what kind of kicker?  Pairs of Aces, sure, but 88?
2. When the flop comes, what do they bet with?  Some players only bet top pair, and fold if they have second.  Some players call down with second pair.  Some players call when they hit any part of the flop.
3. What can't they fold?  Some players can't fold top pair.  Some players can't fold an ace that hits the flop.  Knowing that makes me feel better when they keep calling me down.

I studied my opponents and then put my plan into action.  I picked the weakest player that I had the best read on.  I also marked one that I'd concluded was tricky and made a note to stay away from him.

The weak player was exactly to my left, the worst possible position for me.  However it didn't matter, I had an excellent read on him.  He called a raise with any pair, or an Ace with a kicker of Ten or better.  He checked the flop unless he had top pair.   When he bet the flop, conversely, I knew that he had top pair, an overpair, or possibly a significantly better hand.  I could easily and quickly compute the odds based upon the narrow range of hands I considered he could have.

It was like I could see his cards.  He played every hand exactly the same, and so I knew when he deviated from his pattern.  I played 75% of the hands I was dealt because he and the other passive players were so transparent in the way they played.  I also played very aggressively.  I made $50 in an hour, but I was damn busy.  Every hand the players played I was frantically going through the hand history.  Even if there wasn't a showdown, I gleaned useful information.  If there was a showdown I had a goldmine of information to process.  I was typing notes like a madman.

I was afraid this was a fluke, so I picked another 6 seat table and tried it again.  I wanted to play a 6 seated table because making notes on 9 people was too hectic.  I found the passive players and punished them while avoiding the tricky ones.  I made another $50.

I sat down at another 6 seater table at random.  I planned and executed the same strategy and won $95.

Ok, this is probably not a fluke, but that doesn't mean I'm playing perfectly.  In fact I specifically made a bet that shouldn't have been called unless I was beat....and I was called by someone with a weak hand.  If I was having this discussion on 2+2 or the Poker Tracker Forum, they'd say, "Come back when you've got 50,000 hands and tell us how it went."  I'm not so flawed that I would consider an afternoon a statistically relevant sample.  But like Neo in the Matrix, I felt like I could really see the numbers that made up everything.  All this data is always there, and I've actually seen it, but subsequently discarded all except the most obvious parts of it. 

Now I have proof that even the smallest bits of information have tremendous use.  This was something that Matros said in a chapter on the classic "Ferguson problem": Poker is a game of information, not cards.  Your cards are irrelevant.

I really feel like I have opened up an entirely new avenue in poker.  This is why I love this game, it's possibilities are as endless as the human mind, because at the end of the day, humans play the cards.

Experienced poker players will say all this is all incredibly obvious, but it was new to me.  Poker is often a solitary journey, since when you're dealt a hand, it's only you that plays it.  I have a pretty supportive peer group that can analyze hands post-mortem, but when you're playing a hand, only you are playing the hand.

I'm excited, this is like rediscovering poker.  I also love this game because it keeps one humble.  No matter how much you think you know, there's always more to learn, and people better than you to learn from/about.

I get lied to occasionally.

Today I was listening to someone do a reference call for a product I'm considering purchasing.  He said, "I really appreciate the experience that upper management brings to the company."

Honestly, that the biggest load of bullshit I've heard all week.  It's such a nothing phrase.  That's like saying, "I really appreciate that the fireman that saved my house brought lots of firefighting experience to his job."

No shit sherlock, that's his job.

Now he's one year old!

It's not that I don't love, you, but I've been seeing other blogs.

The baby turned one year old right before we headed to Atlantic city for a week.  You heard me right, my wife, the most fabulous woman in the world, rented us a beach house adjacent to Atlantic City, home of all things card-like.  By day we played on the beach, and at night I went and played cards.  It was a beautiful thing.  I got in some tournament practice and some cash game time.  I lost money over all for the trip even if you don't include the tournaments I played, which I usually view as money down the drain.  But it was a lot of fun so I have no regrets.

For Ish's birthday, Sarah managed to find a bakery that makes vegan cakes.  Since he's still allergic to dairy we got a dairy-free carrot cake that's really, really good.  He seemed to enjoy it.

Under and Alone by William Queen

I just finished "Under and Alone" and was really blown away.  I've only met one undercover detective before, but he struck me as an odd guy.  I met him at the trial of the operators of the Centreville poker game I used to play at.  He really didn't have to worry that much about getting killed if discovered.

Queen, on the other hand, ran the risk every day.  The brothers in the gang out and out told him so, and more than once a violent drunk biker brethren threatened him to see if they could get him to crack.  The crimes the Mongols were involved in, and the viciousness they used routinely were appalling.  There's nothing romantic about this underworld, and I'm glad I know more about it.  I'd never want to be in the same room as any of these guys.

It's a quick, pulpy enjoyable read, and I encourage you to pick it up.

Bad tv, good tv

The season finale of The Sopranos was particularly disappointing.  I was excited to see AJ start to turn his life around, but that didn't make up for the complete lack of a plot climax.

However tonight starts the new season of High Stakes Poker on the Game Show Network.  I first heard about High Stakes Poker from my ex-poker acquaintance, Bradley.  (Bradley stopped speaking to me when I analyzed one of his blogged hands in a way he didn't appreciate)

I have to agree though, that High Stakes Poker is about the best poker show on TV.  I'm not cocky enough to suggest to you that I play anywhere near those stakes, but some of the dynamics are similar.  The thing I've come to loathe about the poker tournaments on TV is that they only show the last bit of the tournament.  A lot of important things happen before the final table that aren't televised that you really need to know to understand the game.

On High Stakes Poker, 10 people (some pros, some amateurs with money) sit around a table and play a high stakes cash game.  They don't say, but I think it's $300/$600 no limit hold'em.  (There may also be a $100 ante, I can't tell.)  The dynamics of this are applicable to the cash game poker many of us play every week (or every day, if you're lucky).

If you miss it you can tivo it.  It's rotated heavily in repeats.