Shabbir's Diary

Profit by position: What would you pay to be psychic in poker?

So for several weeks I've been doing an experiment that Andrew and I came up with. I ran the math on all limit hold'em hands, and then constructed a set that I thought were playable for one bet, and another set playable for two bets. With a roughly repeatable preflop and postflop strategy, I set out to play 5 or 10,000 hands in exactly the same way. I basically set out to be my own poker bot, to test the actual profitability of my strategy against real humans.

I'm 4,400 hands in, and these are my results so far.  I was talking with Andrew about it and he pointed at my results from the button and the cutoff (position 1 off the button).  He pointed out that I was getting roughly the same playable hands at every position.  The distribution over time will give me Aces the same number of times from the button as it does from the under-the-gun spot.  But clearly, with all my hands evening out, I'm getting better profitability from the late position hands.  He said, "There you go, that's the value of position."

I remember another conversation we had about position where Andrew said, "Playing late position is like playing while being psychic.  You get to act after everyone else acts.  What kind of value would you put on being psychic?"

Apparently quite a lot.

Poker results for 2008 (last 5 years)

So after booking a big win playing live poker in 2007, I looked forward to making even more money by moving up stakes in 2008.  I didn't really move up in stakes, and played live for the first half of the year until through a combination of losing at the tables and the need to draw out my poker bankroll for life expenses, I basically busted out.

I continued to play only for pennies online, playing absolutely no online poker until the last half of the year after I'd spent or lost my poker bankroll, and never for more than $.50/$1 stakes.  Even still, I managed to lose about $200 online.  Here are the results for everything (and every game):

Now that's a bloody year. In comparison to the previous four years, it's a marked descent. It also puts me squarely into the red lifetime territory.

Starting last year after my bustout, and into this year I've been working with a coach and doing a great deal of away-from-table study. It's made my online poker game profitable, and will certainly help my live game as well.

Poker and parenting, right now.

First, a new baby:

And now, a screen shot of a $0.25/$0.50 LIMIT Texas Hold'em game I was in this weekend online.

Look carefully at the player in seat 3.  He's sitting on a stack of $10,000+ chips.  Now he can't possibly lose it all at once, but I found this hilarious.  He sat down with $500 (also an excessive amount) and someone criticized his play, saying that all he has is $500.  So he loaded $1,000.  Then he loaded $5,000.  Then he loaded $10,000. 

I looked him up later and realized he's a very accomplished tournament player, and had won a $27,000 first place prize this past December.  He was just slumming it at the lower limits with us.

Safdar Tournament Poker Bootcamp: Results

[I love this photo of Vegas I took on the strip outside Planet Hollywood.  Rampant overbuilding, sex blatantly for sale, and Salvation Army, all in the same shot.  It's the epitome of the city to me.  -Shabbir]

Though I played a lot of poker, and met a new poker colleague who lives in the Bay area, the Vegas trip was a financial disaster.  I didn't cash in any of the tournaments I played and over all I lost money playing $2/$4 and $4/$8.  I managed to leave Vegas with $45 in my live bankroll, which I've subsequently put into FullTiltPoker.

I did enjoy myself though, and got a funny story out of it:

I'm sitting at the Imperial Palace Casino (which you should never eat at) and I found myself at a $2/$4 Limit Texas Hold'em table with 6 opponents.  I've got $55 or so in front of me.  One of my opponents says hello to his wife and asks the dealer if she can play his chips while he goes to the bathroom.  The dealer says ok and off he goes.

His wife gets dealt a pair of jacks (JJ) in early position and raises.  I look down at 76 suited and decide to see if I can catch.  The flop comes 752 with no flush draw.  She bets, I raise in case she has Ace-King and might let it go.  She calls, and I think I'm about to spew chips.

The turn comes a Six and I've got two pair.  I'm pretty sure I'm good here, so when she bets, I raise.  She makes it three bets and I raise again and she calls.  The river comes a Ten, and she must think she's good, and I'm pretty sure I'm ahead against most of her range that fits her actions.  I just don't think she'd play a small pair like that, or connectors.  We both bet/raise/reraise each other until her husband's entire $35 is in the pot.

We turn over the hands and the dealer announces play wil be frozen until the husband returns.  He comes back, the dealer explains what happened, and then ships me the pot.  The table erupts in howling laughter.  I can't decide whether I should laugh or cry and do both, pounding my fists on the table with my head on the rail.

The husband and wife walk away arguing while the dealer says, "I would have played those Jacks in exactly the same way."  He didn't tell me when he'll be playing, since that would be an awesome weakness to exploit.

Poker coaching

So my coach and I have settled into a new routine.  I play all week, pick a session at random, and then run it through a processor and add my notes and send it off.  A day later he sends back notes on my notes and we get on the phone and talk for an hour.

I'm playing $.50/$1 Limit Hold'em online (mostly full tilt) and almost breaking even, which is a great improvement over my previous results where I was just spewing money.  I'm happily grinding it out at those stakes.  Although I'm doing ok straight money wise, I'm clearing a deposit bonus, which helps, and I've got an account with rakeback.

Let me explain: when you play poker in anyplace that is an enterprise, they take a little money out of every pot, called the "rake".  This is what pays the dealers, the rent, the lights, etc.  Casinos are profitable businesses, and the rake on poker alone is the least of the money made at most casinos.

There's rake online, and it adds up.  Over the past 30 days I've played about 4,000 hands over 32 hours and paid $76 of rake.  Poker theorist David Sklansky would tell me that I should expect to make 1 big bet ($1) per hour at these stakes if I'm talented.  That would be $32.  My deal to get part of my rake back from the online casino in exchange for lots of play means that I've got about $20.50 coming to me.    Quick math tells you that if I break even on my bankroll, I've got $0.64 / hr coming to me.  It's not much money, but it's better than losing money.

So my coach and I do an hour talk weekly and go through my hands.  I then get homework to focus on next week: learn when to isolate and why, you need to save a bet on the turn to a scary board with actors behind you, practice playing from the small blind, and so on, and so on.  It's fun.  I told him that this last week was the first time I felt I really had a good read on someone online.  Not like he had a betting tell, but that he liked to call hands all the way to the river that were way too weak, and that all I had to do was isolate myself in a hand with him with halfway decent cards. 

That little bit of knowledge allowed me to raise most of my opponents out of hands until it was just the target and myself.  Once we were the only ones in the hand, my habit of playing better quality cards than him meant that I usually won the pot.  I finished that session with $50 in profit, which is astounding to me for such a small stakes game.  (Especially when my entire bankroll for $.50/$1 is $125)

Tomorrow I head out to Safdar Poker Bootcamp.  Matt and I are going and my plan is to play low buyin tournaments ($70 or less) every day from 9am until 10pm.  I'm staying at the Monte Carlo, which has 3-5 of them a day.  To answer Aaron's previous questions, The airfare cost me $115, the hotel $230, and I'm taking $400-$500.  If I lose that, I'll be going to the movies.

Finally, for all you men out there who have colds (except Tim, who has some mysterious illness that's more serious than a cold), I offer you this:

Congrats, you beat 51 people to win an entry into a poker tournament you can't compete for!

Any denials that "I am not a degenerate gambler" just went out the window.

I play sometimes on sportsbook.com, one of the Cake network poker sites that's really a sportsbetting website.  I don't sports bet (if you know me at all, you know my aversion to anything else in a casino except poker) but I've received the occasional bonus there, so it's worth it to play.

They have a frequent player points system, which awards "gold chips" every batch of Frequent Player Points.  The points reset to zero every month, but the gold chips stay.  There are a small handful of things you can do with gold chips, like play in Sit N Go tournaments where the entry is 5 gold chips and the winner receives....more gold chips.   (ha)

I finally happened to see something I considered buying in for: a $425 satellite ticket to win entry into two tournaments in Australia in mid-January plus traveling money.  Basically everyone that enters the $425 satellite is competing for the one prize package.  So I'd have to win two tournaments to get to Australia: first, I have to win my seat in the satellite (no easy feat), then I have to win the prize package.

I didn't pay attention to any of this, and just was excited that I could win something with the "gold chips" besides more gold chips.  I entered the tournament with 50 other players, and the top 5 got the $425 prize package.  I got lucky catching good cards during the rebuy period so I didn't have to make any hard decisions.  I then played my butt off during the middle and bubble sections of the tournament.  I kept myself in mid-chip position until someone finally got too low a stack and shoved and lost.  Five of us got our satellite ticket....for Sunday after thanksgiving.

Except I have plans for Sunday after thanksgiving.  And were I to win that, the Australian tournament starts January 18th, 2009.  Sarah and our new daughter are due to be born January 25th, if she's punctual, so the last place I'm going to be is Australia.

Heh.  Well it was good tournament experience.

Right now, I phone bank.

But as soon as the election is over I'm playing and analyzing 500 hands a week, minimum.  We're gonna step this up a notch.

Building your mathematical poker game (preflop)

One of the first things my poker coach did, after looking at a sample of my hands, was to send me to hit the books and tell me not to play poker until I was done with probability homework.  He wanted me to work the math out for my game to understand the values of hands, and how they're affected by opponents holdings. 

I used a combination of PokerStove (which my coach wrote) and the poker calculator built into Poker Academy to do some math.  My method was to tell PokerStove that my opponents were playing a specific range of hands and then see how my hands survived.  So for example, I took a hand like Tens (TT) and measured them against opponents playing a range of hands, such as: 66+,A2s+,K6s+,Q8s+,J8s+,T8s+,A7o+,K9o+,QTo+,JTo.

That notation stands for a range of hands of your opponent playing:

• 66: Pocket pairs, 6's or higher
• A2s+: Suited Aces, Ace-Two or higher
• K6s+: Suited Kings, Six kicker or higher

You get the idea.

Pokerstove simulates all the possible five card community boards, tallying who wins the hand.  Here's the results:

22,939,695  games    12.453 secs     1,842,101  games/sec

    equity     win     tie           pots won     pots tied   
Hand 0:     61.947%      61.10%     00.85%           14016461        195527.00   { TT }
Hand 1:     38.053%      37.21%     00.85%            8534902        195529.00   { 66+, A2s+, K6s+, Q8s+, J8s+, T8s+, A7o+, K9o+, QTo+, JTo }

The tens win 61% of the time, the range of junk (25.2% of the top hands) wins 38% of the time.   The more interesting math is when you normalize this to the expected hand equity.  The 66% is simply the chance of winning the hand, but your expected value  over playing any two cards is 123%.  How did I get this?

If this was a coin flop, you and your opponent would each win 50% of the time.  Given the fact that you and your opponent will be dealt the same cards over the long haul, before the card are dealt out you and your opponent have an equal chance of winning the hand.  You have to figure that you are "entitled" to win a hand of poker against one opponent 50% of the time.  If you have a hand that will win more often than 50% of the time, then you've got a big edge.  How much of an edge?  Well when you divide 61.1% chance of winning by 50% chance of winning (61.1% / 50%) = 123.9%. 

That's your expected value.  For every bet you put in, you should expect to receive 123.9% of it back in the long run, even if you lose several individual hands.

The methodology for the numbers works no matter how many opponents you have, though practically you rarely have more than 9 opponents at a poker table. 

Imagine you were playing against 2 opponents the same pair of Tens.

16,415,185  games    13.915 secs     1,179,675  games/sec

    equity     win     tie           pots won     pots tied   
Hand 0:     43.199%      42.37%     00.84%            6954514        137548.83   { TT }
Hand 1:     28.717%      27.71%     01.01%            4549167        165326.33   { 66+, A2s+, K6s+, Q8s+, J8s+, T8s+, A7o+, K9o+, QTo+, JTo }
Hand 2:     28.085%      26.93%     01.16%            4420565        190189.33   { 66+, A2s+, K6s+, Q8s+, J8s+, T8s+, A7o+, K9o+, QTo+, JTo }

On one hand you might think, "Oh crap, my hand was a 61% to win the pot, and now it's 43% to win", but no, it's actually better.  Because there are three of you there's a bigger pot.  And because there are three of you, your "share" of the hand before the cards are dealt is 33%.  Suddenly your hand has a (43.199% / 33%) = 130.9% expected value.  It got stronger!

So the first thing my coach did was send me to do the math on all possible starting hands, so I could understand, at least from a mathematical point of view, what hands were likely to return more money to me than I would put into them.

Take 87 suited, for example.  Many poker players will tell you of the power of suited connecting cards, because of their ability to make multiple good hands, like flushes and straights.  The problem is that depending on your opponents (both their number and their potential range), they aren't necessarily favorites.  Look at this analysis of 87s vs 2 players playing the top 25% of hands:

  11,430,622  games     8.365 secs     1,366,482  games/sec

    equity     win     tie           pots won     pots tied   
Hand 0:     27.241%      26.84%     00.40%            3068116         46166.50   { 87s }
Hand 1:     36.560%      35.04%     01.53%            4005131        174548.00   { 66+, A2s+, K6s+, Q8s+, J8s+, T8s+, A7o+, K9o+, QTo+, JTo }
Hand 2:     36.199%      34.66%     01.54%            3962141        176209.00   { 66+, A2s+, K6s+, Q8s+, J8s+, T8s+, A7o+, K9o+, QTo+, JTo }

Those suited connectors are a 27.241% chance to win, which is worse than the 33% chance to win before the cards even come out.  Assuming you started this hand with a 1/3rd chance to win before the cards were dealt, playing this hand puts you farther behind your opponents despite their broad, loose range.  The expected value of this hand against these two types of opponents is 27.241% / 33% = 82.5%.  So for every bet you put into this hand in this context, you're only getting 82.5% of that money back in winnings. 

In other words, don't play this hand against two opponents like this.  If you run the PokerStove numbers you'll see it becomes dead even when you've got 4 or 5 opponents, and begins to gain a little edge at 6 or more opponents of this type.

So my homework, which I was told to finish before I played any more poker, required me to calculate for every possible starting hand, against up to 8 opponents, the expected value of every hand in every situation.  I think in a future post I'll share that math with you, and talk about how it's useful in figuring out how to play a hand.

O'Shea's Casino and the Vegas Carnival

When I say Vegas is like a carnival, it was never more obvious to me than at O'Shea's casino.  I was sitting at a $1/$2 no limit table, waiting for the poker tournament to start.  I had just cracked a guy's Aces with 76o and two pair when I saw a "little person" walk by me out of the casino with a microphone.  He was headed to the strip, and since I was sitting at the poker table at the front of the casino, he was right behind me.  I thought, "Man, Vegas must be a good place to get work as a little person."  He stands outside the casino and beckons people in with drink specials and stories of casino-sponsored "beer pong".  (private wagering only)

I then turned back to my game and realized that it was a mix of locals who were not drinking and tourists who were drinking.  The money was flowing in the expected direction.  When the tournament started it just got worse, as I went to a room with mirrored walls where I was obsessively hiding my cards while I tried to avoid the calling station tourists who never fold and sometimes catch hands. 

An off-shift dealer played in the game in the seat next to me and told me that the off-duty dealers often win their tournaments.  (He got put out, though)   Rule infractions were awful and fully 30% of the $45 entry fee went straight to the house.  (I took third place)

This was probably the easiest place I played, and the worst environment for poker.  Hard to complain too much when you cash though.

Vegas recap

I'll post the third day wrapup later, but the upshot on Vegas is that I made a total net of $544 on tournament wins, and I lost net $158 on the cash games I played waiting for tournaments to start, or waiting for Tim or Katie to finish a tourney they were in.  Those are really good results for a trip where I was planning on losing money.  Here's a chart.

This is part of an overall trend where my cash game is in freefall and I'm not sure what to do about it.  I'm basically net zero for the year.  Over and over again in Vegas people (not just Tim and Katie, but others) kept telling me I was a good tournament player.

The truth is I'm a better tournament player than people who don't have much experience or skill.  This includes all tourists, anyone who doesn't catch cards, anyone who doesn't know how to play a short stack, and people who play a lot but don't study their play and make changes and improvements.  That's a lot of people, and as you can see, when I run into them or I catch a few cards I can be dangerous.  There's a classic poker archetype of the retiree who plays poker for fun and whose game never changes.  I often played circles around them, though they probably play tournaments twice a week.

But up against real competition, which of all places was most fierce at the Treasure Island 10pm tournament, I'm an underdog.

And so I think the smart thing to do is start changing my poker night and my poker time allocation to include time for tournaments.  I find that I can spend more time analyzing the hand rationally when the tournament chips are in fact not real money and I know the blinds are increasing.  I can happily avoid a confrontation with a difficult decision knowing that when we get into a clutch situation and the blinds get high, I can put my opponent to a more difficult decision earlier in the hand. 

That doesn't mean I can't play deep stack tournaments.  I think I found that in the deep stack tourneys I played at the Rio that my amateur opponents made more mistakes the longer they had for levels.  As it started I explained to Tim and Katie my theory on it and I ended up being right as I exploited players who seemed willing to push all their chips in with KK in the first two hours.

The one overarching lesson I learned was that generally you are your own worst enemy in a poker tournament.  You put yourself out, rarely does somebody else.  Every confrontation you find yourself in is one of your own making.  Only you can put your chips in the pot, and while I got put out of one tournament with a 20 to 1 longshot by my opponents, it's still the exception rather than the rule.

It's also true that you can mentally put yourself out.  Both Tim and I watched opponents who wanted to be somewhere else simply implode at the final table, either through lack of confidence or patience.

And finally a note on Vegas: I spent a lot of time in close proximity to locals either at the poker table or speaking to the dealers.  I had the overwhelming feeling of being around a lot of carnies.  The atmosphere of Vegas certainly is carnival-like with it's amusements, but that's not what I mean.  It's like being around a set of people who have their own code and traditions and don't take well to outsiders.  None of the Vegas locals who work in the casino industry seemed to have anything but tolerance for the tourists, and quite a few had difficulty hiding their disdain.  After three very long days in Vegas I felt literally like a mark, waiting to be seperated from my money.  I never felt this as much as I did at the Treasure Island tournament which was populated with locals just getting off work at 10pm.

I also noticed this playing at the MGM Grand a few years ago with Katie.  All the off duty dealers would sit and play poker together with their friends who were on duty, and at some point it was palpable that there was a cameraderie you weren't part of.  Subtle forms of cheating in that situation from "checking it down with your friends" to "raising the monkey/tourist in the middle" are indetectable by the outsider.

It's not a feeling I enjoyed, and I'm not sure how to get rid of it.