Live from Aruba

We're in Aruba this week because I won a seat at the Aruba Classic. We flew in yesterday on a trip that took more than 12 hours. So far, it has been excellent. The kids were really well behaved on the trip.

Aruba is a nice touristy town. Hot and humid of course. The beaches are clean and not too crowded. Prices are high, but English and USD are pretty much everywhere. There's a lot of American restaurant chains, McDonalds, Wendy's, TGIF, Tony Roma's, Sbarros, Hooters. We ate at one of the the hotel's restaurants having a decent prime rib buffet dinner.

Ultimate Bet and the Radisson have really gone all out. UB has a pretty big staff on hand and they reserved the whole hotel. The UB branding is everywhere. We got a nice bag of schwag which includes a decent bag, 2 shirts, a deck of UB cards, a silkscreened wrap. In addition to that bag, I got a second pretty nice shoulder bag because I'm a VIP online.

The tournament starts on Monday at noon(local time is EST), but I don't play until noon on Tuesday, because the whole family is here I won't be playing cards much until Tuesday. I'll try to get an hour or two of poker in after they go to sleep. I played a bit last night. At the end of the night I overheard them at the 5/10 plo table next to me explaining to a player that he had to play exactly two cards. Obviously I was in the wrong game. Results for last night: 2 hours at 2/5 cash nlhe +$50.

I'll try to twitter results too when the tournament starts.

Going to Aruba

I'm going to be headed to Aruba in late September. I won a poker tournament online at Ultimate Bet which will give me an entry to a $5,000+500 buyin event and $3,000 in travel money. I have been playing a lot of poker this year, so as a reward Ultimate Bet gave me a free seat to a poker tournament for this morning.

Tournament 1 was a satellite which if I placed in the top 20%, I'd get a seat into another tournament. About 1/3 of the people didn't show up for that tournament, so getting to the top %20 wasn't that hard. That won me a seat into another satellite.

Tournament 2 was another no limit hold'em satellite with a prize of 50 $8500 packages, so anyone placing in the top 50 gets to go to Aruba. I played a very good tournament, didn't get great cards, but picked my spots and all my hands held up and I did get some good cards when I needed them. It was a bit nerve racking near the end, because I was very close to the bubble. I played some of the tightest poker of my life, including folding AK to no bet, AK to one raise, QQ to a raise, reraise preflop. I'd never do some of those things if the payout structure was more like a standard tournament, but with the "all places pay the same" there's no need to try to accumulate chips beyond what you need to make the money, so you can play super conservative.

I'm excited to go. This will actually be my second time. About 5 years ago I had a similar experience, won a seat and went to aruba. I didn't get anywhere then, but it was still fun.

This year they are guaranteeing $4,000,000 in total prize pool and $1m to first place. So that means they are expecting at least 800 players at a $5,000 buyin. Wish me luck in September.

Been Busy

I've been busy lately. I bought and finished BioShock already. Now I'm playing Team Fortress 2 which is excellent. If you haven't seen the videos of it check them out, they are funny and I love the graphics style. They also kept a lot of the things that made the original Team Fortress so fun.

I'm also playing quite a bit of poker. The new house is pretty close to Garden City Casino and I feel like I can win at any except the very biggest game there which is a 40/80 limit game. My favorite games are the 20/40 limit and the 5-200 spread limit. The spread limit game is odd for non-regulars. It's a $3 small blind, $5 big blind, and any raise can be a maximum of $200. So there are pots of $600 regularly. One bad thing about it is that the maximum buyin is $200, so if you bet $20 and get a couple callers then you might have just 1 more bet or 1 raise before you're all in. That takes away some of the postflop fun and a player who hasn't won a pot feels short stacked. I can see the value of a max buyin game, but I wish they'd raise the max buyin to $400.

Amusing night of poker

Last night a few of us went to Lucky Chances for a night of poker. It was the first time I'd been there in about a year. I was a pleasantly surprised to learn that they have very few limit games anymore. I know that people only want to play no limit nowadays, but previously they'd been pretty resistant to running so many no limit games(I hear that limit games are much more profitable for the house). But last night, they had many 2-3-5 spread limit and 1-1-2 spread limit tables. The spread limit means that it's not technically no-limit, but you can only bet between the minimum and $200. I still haven't exactly figured out why there's a $200 cap, but at least at the San Jose card rooms, there was a city imposed limit that the bet size could not exceed $200. The last time I was there, I remember having to wait more than 2 hours to get into the small spread limit game and it was so annoying that we had given up and just played 6/12.

I sit down at a 1-1-2 game and buy in for the max of $200 and I don't to do a lot for about a half hour. Later I switch to the table where my friends are at and my first hand I get aces and I bust a short stack for about $60. Things continue for a while and I continue to get good cards and I start to build a reasonable size stack. We amused ourselves by trying to bet prime numbers

Later on in the night we see Adam Morrison walk through the tables. Earlier in the night, he and the Charlotte Bobcats were soundly defeated by the Golden State Warriors and I guess he figured he'd use some of his down time and come in to play some cards. After my friends left, I switched over to Adam's table because he was playing 1-1-2 as well. It didn't take long to realize that he wasn't playing very well. In the 2-3 hours I played with him, he rebought 5 or 6 times for $100. It seems like he has the capability and understanding to play reasonably, but it's kind of chump change for a guy whose NBA contract pays $3mil/year. So it's not a huge surprise that he doesn't play like the money means something to him. He made a number of bad preflop calls, quite a few questionable chases and showed a couple bluffs and generally didn't play well.

I didn't play that great either, there was quite a bit of money flowing around the table and because I wasn't getting good cards at Adam's table, I played a bit looser than I normally do so I bled faster than I would like. It was the kind of game where preflop pots are big and to take down a pot, you need to bet the pot twice after the flop to get people to fold. So I was trying to see some flops for cheap and flop a big hand.

I ended the night +67 which wasn't very impressive considering the action. I also missed another prop bet with the guys and that sucks because I've missed one at every poker outing we've had since we instituted them.

Extra action

At our regular poker game we decide to introduce a new way for some extra action with some extra proposition(prop) bets. If you hit a flop which contains only cards, you get $1 from each player at the table. For instance if you have 456, a 456 or a 554 board pays you. This is just something new and amusing we added. We'll see if it lasts. There's no skill in it at all other than remembering to notice it. But it does add a bit of spice to a game that we've gotten a bit to complacent with.

YACHT-11

Yesterday was the semi-annual YACHT poker tournament. I haven't been playing much lately, but I always try and go because its a good time. As usual it's a $40 buyin, but it's ballooned to an event with over 90 players.

This year I spent most of my time bleeding off money in the main tournament, culminating in an unimpressive finish somewhere in the middle rounds. The side game I sat down in was a mixed dealer's choice game pot limit game of .25/.50 antes. My side game performance was largely similar to my tournament performance, except for about 4 hands of courchevel where I made back all the money I lost. So overall it was good.

Habu poker

The new poker game I had dreamed up was well received. I conceived of the game quite a while ago, but I'd never bothered to try to convince other people to try and play it until this weekend and I was pleased with how it did. We must have played at least 6-8 hours of it with few complaints. Dave and Mike agreed that it should be called Habu, a shortened form of my nickname Habuchan(which itself has a bit of a story behind it but I'll leave that for a later date). The game is called "Habu", but may also be called "Habu in the Hole". It can be summarized simply as:

Hold'em Hi/Lo 8 or better, but instead of a community river card, each player gets an individual hole card(you can play all 3 hole cards).

It is best played pot limit, but limit is also fine. There were a few reasons I conjured up this unusual game, among them:

I feel like the domination effect is too strong in Hold'em, so I wanted to make bad aces playable.
I enjoy the interesting decisions in Omaha 8 when you are faced with a pot sized bet on the river to call for half the pot.
Unlike Omaha, you are not frequently required to get all in on a flop with a big hand against a big draw on a near coin flip, but like Omaha you usually still have outs to improve if you do.

The game has some good unanticipated side effects. Two wheel cards become strong betting hands like they do in o8. Correct turn play is I think more important because the chance of someone outdrawing you on the last card is much greater in Habu. Someone can turn over a completely disguised hand(like trips in the hole to make quads or a 3 flush with a low to scoop), but it doesn't happen so frequently that you feel helpless against it.

Other fun bits: Getting beat on the last card is no longer called getting rivered, it's called getting Habuchan'ed. You can play a variant with 7th street being exposed instead of being in the hole, this is currently called Exposed Habu, but we're open to other naming suggestions. This game has the property that someone's 7th street can lead to a ridiculously scary board. For instance on a board of KK49, if someone catches a K then everyone else bricks they just sorta look sad and fold. We are pretty sure that Exposed Habu made the game less interesting so Habu in the hole is the standard but YMMV.

So try out Habu at your next home game and tell me how it goes. I'll attempt to get a game going at Yacht-10 if I can get off of the waiting list and into the tournament. I expect this invention to make me millions.

What kind of poker bot do you want to play against?

I was talking with my friend Sam yesterday. He works on the AI for DD Poker. He had some interesting things to say. He says their main competitor is Poker Academy, because both DD Poker and Poker Academy are designed to make you play better. (There are a bunch of "Entertainment" type of poker programs which have fancy graphics and sound, but generally terrible computer play.) He had some interesting things to say. His analysis of the Poker Academy stuff was that it played a better mathematically correct game, but there were some flaws. Fundamentally, Poker Academy doesn't teach you to play better against people, only mathematically correct bots. DD Poker on the other hand has options that mimic real life play, like going on tilt after a bad beat and a tendency to chase draws. Of course if you are very bad, both DD Poker and Poker Academy will help your game. But DD Poker is designed to help you play better NLHE tournaments against real players.
Another thing that Sam was proud of about DD Poker is that it gives better reasoning behind the advice it gives to players. While Poker Academy can tell you to call, bet or fold, DD Poker can go one step beyond and tell you what factors it is using make its decision. Sam's philosophy was that he would rather have even bad decisions with the logic behind them rather than just the raw advice. Because poker is so situational there is rarely an absolutely right answer. This lets the player reject advice when the situation warrants it.

Friends at WSOP

Well the WSOP is under way and Patri has had a great day 1. He's well above average in stacks with over 50k. Dave doesn't play until Saturday which is unfortunate because people who played on Thursday and Friday got a break and don't need to play again until Sunday. The fatigue factor is certainly going to hurt some people after the first day or two. He put in an interesting link to a web site i'd never seen before, a Poker player database. Even Dave was in it.

Poker swapping action

Dave is going to the world series fo poker next month with someone staking his full $10k buyin. After seeing this, Patri offered up some of his winnings. They are both are paying out the same rate of %50 of their returns.

Here's a couple of interesting things.

All this swapping and buying and selling of players is a great idea for a determining value for poker players. If patri and dave do a normal swap for %10 of the $10k buyin($1k), if dave wins $100k, then patri would get $10k, and vice versa. It is a good way to lower variance. However, it assumes that both have an equal expected return. Patri made things much more interesting by offering to make non-par swaps with other players playing in the main event. So he might only offer %10 of his winnings for %5 of dave's or some other agreed upon rate. This means you can figure out what someone else thinks of your play. If Patri offered his own %10 for Dave's %5, then you could deduce that Patri thinks he is 1/2 as good as Dave. Makes things very interesting.

Dave told me that he's bought a piece of of Bill Chen(and some other guy who he doesn't know, but trusts Bill to know). Bill said that he was selling some of his winnings, but after a large amount of interest from people who wanted to invest in him, he decided to limit the amount he sold. This is a perfect opportunity for another secondary market in a limited supply of player shares. Dave thinks he could already resell the share he owns of Bill for a profit.

Someone want to create a derivatives market for individual players?

Poker at the Wynn

To get to Utah, we flew into Las Vegas because flying into St. George was significantly more expensive, and Tracy was kind enough to allocate some time on the last day for me to play poker in Vegas. So while she walked around in the Vegas heat, I sat down for a few hours at the brand new Wynn hotel. The poker room is very nice, as nice as the Bellagio, which is the gold standard for poker rooms. They have an excellent waiting list system. There's a large plasma display with all the games and players, tables and lists. They had probably 30 tables or so, and they were spreading a good variety of games. No Limit holdem at 1/2, 2/5, 5/10, and 10/20. Then in limit holdem they had 4/8, 8/16, 15/30, and 40/80. I sat down in a tougher than average 1/2 nlhe game for about 4-5 hours and played a little too loose and lost $122. The celebrity table had Daniel Negreanu and Barry Greenstein playing 500/1000 limit holdem. Apparently Daniel has an open challenge where he will play anyone any game heads up for $100k winner take all and Barry had taken him up on it. That's an impressive display of self confidence if nothing else. It makes me wonder how big his bankroll is.

Poker win rate and position

Two things I've been thinking about lately are poker win rates and position.

The standard way of calculating how good a player your are in limit games is to calculate your win rate in terms of big bets per hour you win. Most of the consensus seems to be that a good player can win an average of about 2-3 big bets per hour in a casino. So at a limit $1/2 table, that averages about $4-6/hr, and at a $15/30 table, that's $90/hr. Especially at the smaller games the rake is going to eat into the win rate significantly. The problem with that calculation is that it's sort of based on regular physical casinos. Today a lot of players including myself play a lot more online than in real casinos. So it's better to use the metric that PokerTracker uses, whch is Big Bets won/100 hands. That accounts for the much faster play online which is usually 60-80 hands/hr instead of 40-50 in a real casino.

The other thing I've been considering lately is the value of position, especially when related to pot limit omaha on the flop. In omaha, checking and giving someone an opportunity to see a free card is a huge mistake when you have th e best hand because any single card could improve an opponents hand dramatically. This makes it's much less common for people to attempt to checkraise on the flop. The relative lack of checkraising on the flop therefore means a position only bet can be made relatively frequently and successfully. This leads to my ultimate conclusion which is that position is significantly more important in pot limit omaha than both pot or no limit hold'em.

Poker formats to prevent collusion

More poker stuff. Paul Phillip's blog has been talking about collusion lately and how to prevent it. I think someone should come up with some tournament formats that discourage collusion, or make it clear where other interests lie. The only tournament format which does that is a full headsup tournament which isn't really that practical to run for a casino. Maybe a team format would make hidden collusion and soft play less common. Lucky Chances has a doubles tournament every year where 2 people play on a team. Every twenty minutes, you don't play and your partner sits out then you switch. It's not that great a format, someone could come up with something better. Any ideas?

Party Poker Bad beat jackpot

The Party Poker Badbeat Jackpot is the largest I've ever seen. At over 400k, it's about twice as large as I've seen. It's hard to qualify for it. You need to have four of a kind 8's beaten, and both hole cards must play(rules here). It's so large that I've even started to play some bad beat tables. I'm pretty sure it's still a losing proposition, but I only play the tables when the tables look good and the badbeat jackpot is huge and it's certainly better than the lottery.

Miscellaneous gaming/gambling stuff

I've tried out Poker Tracker, and I may buy it. It can give you invaluable information about yours and other people's games. It helps me monitor my variance, win rate and other important statistics. I can also use it to pick out bad players more easily. There's some question of the ethics of using a program like this to have perfect recall of how an opponent plays. Is it wrong to have a complete history of how someone has played? Is it any different if everyone has access to the same information? Is it different if they do or do not know that you have access to it? How much is that data worth exactly?

It reminds me of a story I heard before one of the highly touted human vs computer chess matches. World reknowned player Gary Kasparov complained that IBM's Deep Blue chess computer had a significant advantage because the programmers could provide it with all the games that Kasparov had ever played, while Kasparov could not study Deep Blue's play at all because it was a closely kept secret. If I recall correctly, some international chess federation agreed with Kasparov and he was allowed to have a history of Deep Blue's play.

Separately, I had an amusing incident the other night where I was playing for 40 minutes of 3/6 stud hi thinking that I was playing stud8. Oops. Good thing I only lost $40. This just reinforces my opinion is that stud hi is a terrible game(the fact that I don't know when I am playing at it, and that that I am terrible at it even when I know I'm playing it has absolutely positively nothing to do with why I hate the game).

I've decided to allocate a bit of my precious free time to a fantasy baseball league. I have no idea if my team is any good, but I suspect it's mediocre. I figure it'll help me learn a bit more about current baseball theory. Unlike fantasy football which I actually know something about, this isn't for any money and I don't care if I do well at all. I'm still not even totally sure about the rules yet, and it started last week.

WSOP

The World Series of Poker is really going to be a spectacle this year. Instead of playing at the traditional Horseshoe Binions, most of the tournament will be taking place at The Rio. The reason for this is that Binion's just can't accomodate the expected 6600 participants. That's 3x last year's 2200 participants. At 10k each, that's going to be $60million in prizes. I imagine they'll pay over 500 places. And the winner will probably get 10-15 million dollars. It will also be held about 1 month later than it usually is, so that they can prepare for all the extra participants. Usually it starts in late May, this year it starts in late June. I might try one or two satellites to get a seat, but the frequency of actually winning cash back is so rare that it is pretty close to throwing money on the lottery.

YACHT-9

Last night I went to the 9th Yet Another Cool Holdem Tournament(YACHT-9). It's a medium sized tournament(61 players) with a $40 buyin. It's a fun event because the people are generally friendly and it's not that big a game so there's not a huge competitiveness that exists in casino games and bigger tournaments.

The tournament went not that great. For the first hour I got really good hands, but didn't get paid off at all, so I was only up a bit after an hour. Then the second hour I got no hands and was shortly moved to a table where everyone moved all in a lot, so I had to just move in when I saw a hand. I had it hold up a couple of times, but not long enough. It wasn't very eventful.

The game afterwards was pretty fun. I had two interesting hands. First one: We are playing limit 1/2 crazy pineapple 8 or better. Nat calls first to act. 2 other players call behind and I call from the small blind with A74. The big blind checks and we see a flop. The flop is A63, so I bet, Nat calls and a late position player raises. I have a two way hand and I really don't want to chop either the high half or the low half, so I reraise hoping to get Nat to fold. It doesn't come as a total surprise that Nat calls, and the other player calls. The turn is a 2, giving me the best possible low, plus my pair of aces may still be good for high, so I bet out. Both players call. Then the river is a 4, so the board looks like A63 2 4. Any 5 beats me both ways, so I check, Nat bets, the other guy folds and I make a crying call and of course Nat has A5. So he had me beat for high anyways, but we each had 3 outs to scoop.

Later I move to the much bigger 1/2 pot limit hold'em game and on the 4th hand, it goes like this. Kojo limps firs t to act. I loudly taunt him for such weak play. 5 people limp behind him. I am in the big blind, then I look down and find that I have QQ. And after that table talk, I have to raise. So I bet the $12 pot. Everyone except the small blind folds and so he decides to raise to $40. I think for a long while about raising the pot. We both have about $130 total. After some thought I decide he has AK. So my plan is to just call and then if the flop has an Ace or King, I will check and fold, otherwise I will try to get all in on the flop. I execute my plan to perfection. I call the $40. The flop is TT7 with two clubs. He bets out and then I move all in, and he calls. He has AT, I reach into my wallet to get some more money. My best play would have been to get all in before the flop. I was pretty sure he didn't have AA or KK, but I figured that rather than getting all in on a coin flip. I could get all my money in when was ahead on the flop.

I eventually made back all my money including the tournament buyin thanks mostly to a very loose player who had won a lot of money earlier and was giving it back slowly but surely.

It's a great event, I am bummed that I've missed the past 4 of them.

Poker online

It's odd that I play much bigger games online than I do at a casino. Part of it is that I rarely have enough cash on hand to play anything bigger than 6/12, while online I have my whole bankroll available.

One thing that I have gotten lazy about is keeping statistics. I am a winning player, but I am probably not winning as much as I should be. I go through phases where sometimes I think I play weak/tight, but then I try to adjust my game and get a bit aggressive. I'm a bit more more prone to being too weak/tight than being too loose/aggressive, but that's ok by me because it cuts down the variance. I think my pot limit omaha and omaha8 games have improved substantially against typical competition. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't do so well against top level competition, but I feel like I can beat pretty much any small or medium sized online game.

You know that poker is mainstream when your high school is having a charity poker event. I got an email from my high school alumni association saying they were having a fundraising Hold'em event. $25 buyin, some prizes for the winners, but the money goes to charity. If I were back home I'd stop by. Good luck classmates.