Day #12, Part #1: My first attempt at live blogging a poker tourney, Part #1

Hey all, this one’s a bit of a doozy.  I post this for historical purposes.  This was the first four-digit buy-in tournament in Canadian casino history, taking place (as most major tournaments did at the time) at Cash Casino in Calgary.  Since I had been eliminated earlier in the event, I thought I would do poker history a little bit of a favor and chronicle the event as best as I could.  Who knows, I figured, this might come in handy someday if poker ever gets so popular that people will go out of their way to try and blog major tournaments live.

And so, there I was, one court reporter with special press privileges (a.k.a. a little table off by the side) trying to take it all in.  And bear in mind that poker did not move at the glacial, Hollywooding pace that major tournaments go at now.  Nor did I have underlings at each table where I collate the results in quasi-real time.  This is me, watching and typing everything in madly on what I had for a laptop on such short notice – an old clunker that only ran Windows 3.1, which I picked up from the City of Calgary surplus for a whopping $5.  But, between the might of the Dvorak Keyboard and knowing most of the players in the poker scene quite well, I’d like to think I was doing passable.

Some of you might recognize this as a tournament report I submitted (in VERY abbreviated form) to Canadian Poker Player magazine.  This is literally as it flowed from my brain.  That first character was typed when the first card went out on the final day.

Man, I miss those days at Cash, and those earlier days of poker in general.  Yes, yes, I know — Myth of the Golden Age, bla bla bla.

I hope you enjoy it.  Part 2, tomorrow, will feature my attempt at hand-by-hand blogging.  It will likely be a little on the dry and boring side, so I will include some bonus content as well.

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The Final Day:

37 players, the sole survivors, began play on Sunday morning of the biggest poker tournament the nation had ever seen.  2.2 million in play.  Antes 100, blinds are 1500/3000.  The average stack was over 59,000 in chips, meaning that there was still a lot of play left for people’s chips, when each person has almost twenty times the big blind.

Only one hand and two and a half minutes in, the first elimination took place.  Ace-queen suited raised under the gun and ran into pocket kings for all the chips.  This would be a portent of how the early stages in the final day would play on, as you could overhear no shortage of raises, reraises and all-in calls from the get go.  Clearly, the players weren’t satisfied with merely making the finals or possibly sneaking into a bottom spot.  Not when first prize is one year’s salary for most of us.

Meanwhile, the table that featured the first elimination featuring a man named Terry continue his hot streat of cards.  After the pocket kings he had in the first hand, his next four hands were another pair of kings, a pair of queens, ace-king and some random hand which he folded, soliciting mock cries of sympathy from the others nearby.  Terry’s lucky streak almost continued to the next hand, where his pocket sixes isolated Harvey’s under-the-gun last stand raise with ace-ten, but only an ace on the river let Harvey scurry back into the ring.  Opinion was split as to whether it was more shocking that Terry didn’t have at least jacks, or that Terry didn’t continue his early hot push.

On table 8, disaster struck for Jerry Carter, who opened the 3000 blind under the gun for 9000, which got called by the Don, the very next player over, who was committing about one-fifth of his chips.  The flop came Q-J-9 with two diamonds, and after a brief raising war, all Don’s chips went in.  Jerry was in the lead with his pocket kings, but nothing short of a thermonuclear device was going to get Don’s ace-ten of diamonds out of the pot.  A raggy diamond on the turn spelled the end of that hand and half of Jerry’s stack.  To his credit, Jerry’s entire reaction was “wow, nice hand”, and only a brief step back from the table would show you anything went wrong at all.  If Jerry does make a comeback with a nice prize, a huge part of that will be due to keeping his cool in a situation that would have sent many pros off the deep end.

Back on table 9, Terry defends his blind against a preflop raise by Galen, a young man who entered the second day with a good-sized stack.  The flop comes 9-2-3 rainbow, Terry checks and calls a bet, then immediately makes a good-sized bet on the turn when the 5 of clubs puts a two-flush on board.  On the river, the Q of spades, Terry checks and folds to a 1/4 pot bet by Galen, who then turns over his J-7 of clubs, showing only a busted draw!

Usually the hubris of showing a big, successful bluff gets punished at some point, but not right now, as Galen immediately reraises Terry’s A-Q offsuit with pocket jacks, and wins the coin-toss.  Just like that, Galen has reversed Terry’s early run of good fortune in two hands.

Jerry Carter picks up the blinds in middle position, the rebuilding process beginning anew.

An elimination at the 36-minute mark of Level 1 brings the count down to thirty and the average stack up to 70,000.  Each person left is now just ten spots from the money, and if it is to be believed, I can literally feel the tension rising nearly to the level it was before Day One started, as tournament co-director Mike O’Connor announces that the bottom three spots are a ‘mere’ $1,500.

On table 9, local pro Wayne makes a huge all-in bet on the button for 32k, over 10 times the big blind, leaving Galen in a pickle on whether to make a stand.  Galen eventually lets it go, but Wayne has tipped his hat that he is prepared to play any hand for all his chips preflop.  It’s times like this that Sklansky’s “System” might well prosper.

Eventually, on table 9, Terry’s string of good luck came to an end.  Huy, a very solid player with a decent stack, made a late-position blind-steal raise with pocket threes.  Terry called with pocket eights, and the combination of Huy’s minimum flop bet and the 5-4-3 rainbow board hooked Terry in for the rest of his chips.  Continuing a very positive trend by eliminated players, Terry took this very well, with no more comment than “Looks like I’m done”.  Is the Hellmuth School finally losing the cultural war to polite and respectful players?

One big pot after another goes down on table 8.  First, it was Johnny Boy’s set-versus-aces-up win, then it was an awesome call preflop with ace-eight suited by Don, who merely limped in late position with no one in front of him, then called a huge all-in move from the big blind, who had king-queen offsuit.  Proof that, in poker, a little unorthodoxy will go a long way at times.

Huy, on table 9, makes a loose call on a T-6-6 flop with KQ offsuit.  Huy insisted he smelt weakness, but what he was smelling was the sweet aroma of a queen on the turn that would give him the pot over pocket jacks and another elimination that crept each person one step closer to the payday, only five people still in the way.

The pace continues to slow down, as I believe the gravity of the situation is finally setting in on these gamblers.  Even on table 8, where the bulk of the action has been, most pots are won preflop with a simple raise.  Here, more than any other time in the tournament, is where good knowledge of the people at your table and a sound graps of hot-and-cold hand percentages pays the most.

Still in the tournament is Buddy Ashmore, making his second consecutive raise in middle position.  Buddy has been fighting from an average stack all day, rarely getting action preflop but being very selective where he takes his stab.  It will be interesting to see what happens when Buddy gets action for all his chips and takes it.

The most well-known competitor here, Vince “Shampoo” Deleo, lost almost all his chips – he was so sure he was eliminated that he left the table, coming back with a dejected look on his face to post his remaining chips in the blind, which went on the very next hand.

As the players took their break, overhearing the chatter was very telling.  Most if not all of the players with marginal chip positions are happy to wait until they get into the prize.  As is traditional at Cash Casino tournaments, the prize ramp is nice and smooth, even up to the final spots.  Getting $1,500 for 20th is still half of the 10th place prize of $3,000 and I’m sure the saavy tournament players here know this all too well.

Blinds increase to 3000/6000, the ante to 200, and the game resumes.  Immediately, Rochelle, who spent the vast majority of the final day folding like mad, took a stand in the big blind with ace-ten offsuit against Shawn on the button, holding queen-jack offsuit.  Rochelle actually flopped an ace and still lost to the jack on the turn and queen on the river.  This just shows you the truth about the game – you can play very well, be very patient, go in with the best and still get the bad break that knocks you out so close to the payday.

The very next hand, Shawn raises the cut-off with king-jack suited on a short big blind who calls with ace-nine offsuit.  This time, the ace-high holds up unimproved.  You’ll see this showdown a lot more as the short stacks realize they need to gamble to pass some of the people who are waiting them out.

Huy continues his reign of terror on table 9, betting all his chips on the turned five of clubs with T-8-8 and two clubs on the flop.  Galen goes into the tank and lays down eventually, and Huy turns over pocket aces, without a club.  Turns out the club may well have saved Galen’s hide, as this enabled him to lay down top pair.

Randy Bot, who specifically reminded me to spell his name correctly with one ‘T’, is the next victim, as he makes a raise in late position with king-jack suited for 18,000 and cannot fold to the all-in reraise from Kevin that covers him at 50,000 – with 75,000 already in the pot, it was too enticing for the remaining 32,000.  A king on the flop does nothing, and Kevin puts himself in nice position for the money round.

Over to table 9, Wayne’s all-in policy finally gets the better of him, as Jason, playing off a short stack, limps in middle position with pocket queens, and Wayne cannot resist the attempt to push all-in preflop with king-ten suited.  Jason’s queens hold up, and the bubble is just on the horizon as only one player remains to leave unpaid.

In one of the most unbelieveable plays I have seen in some time, Tony, a seasoned tournament pro, was made to lay down the best hand to a flop raise by Shawn, who called Tony’s bet on the flop and made a big raise on the turn.  To make a huge play like that and risk going bust, when he could have just as easily laid down, is impressive to say the least.  Once again, Shawn followed the trend of exposing his risky bluff.  Again, the hubris of exposing making such a good play has almost guaranteed Shawn will get action at an inopportune time, if history is any judge, but Galen has yet to pay for it either.  Time will tell.

Buddy Ashmore once again steals the blinds with a raise in middle position, again holding on to that average position.  He has yet to have his preflop raise called to my knowledge.  Huy, meanwhile, parlays his aggressive stance and his aggressive chip total into good position for the money round.

All eyes are focused at the last table playing a hand, as Johnny Boy goes into the tank for two minutes on a K-7-7-9-6 board and a 15,000 bet.  The pot, meanwhile, was over double that, but that 15,000 represents a whole round of blinds that may well make the difference in the near future.

With Huy in the small blind and Buddy in the big blind, Galen simply smooth calls from a stack of over 110,000 – which makes Huy immediately suspicious and folding.  Buddy checks, flop comes 8-3-5 with two hearts.  Buddy checks and Galen fires off 12,000 into the pot.  Again, all other eyes focus on this table, as they are playing hand for hand at this point.  Buddy lays it down.

At this point, the big stacks are really starting to put the screws to those small stacks trying to limp for $1,500 – sound tournament strategy to be sure, but it just adds to the tension every hand.

Jerry opens for 17,000 and Don again cold calls!  Deja vu?

A99 rainbow, jerry moves all in.  He seems to be talking Don into a fold.. Don calls.  Jerry with his AJ, and Don turns over QQ!  Jerry has outdrawn Don in return, and everyone gets into the money!

COMMERCIAL BREAK.

After a brief break, the money round begins.  The prizes are very smooth up to 10, increasing by $300 only at 17th and $600 at 12th.  Once 10th hits, each step will be no more than a 50% jump.  Players are talking like they are very relieved, but you KNOW that’s a brief condition only.

Harvey continues to survive, winning his second coin toss for all his chips, taking on TT against a big reraise from ace-king offsuit.  Meanwhile, Xenia doubles up her pocket deuces, taking a stand against ace-queen offsuit.  The deuce on the turn ices the deal.  Still, no more eliminations.

Ace-king for the man in the hooded sweatshirt holds up again, getting covered for his whole stack by Tony with his ace-jack suited.  Slick wins this time.

For the fourth hand in a row, the all-in holds up.  Xenia got all the chips in on a Q-T-x flop with KQ to Jerry Carter’s KJ.  The open straight stays shut, and Jerry is on his heels with half his chips gone.

“F*** it, I’m all in” shouts a reraiser, reraising a 25000 raise under the gun, to 63000 in MP, with something that will never be seen, as UTG tanks and lays it down eventually.

While this is going on, Slick takes a stand in the small blind, dominating KJ and making the 6th all in to survive.

Galen again raises Huy’s big blind, the fourth confrontation between these two big stacks.  I have a hunch Galen is trying to bust Huy for everything and take over the lead.  Raising someone’s blinds to isolate them, if you have a bead on their play, is just the way to do that.  We’ll see what next lap brings.

Tony is next to raise Huy’s blind, the small one this time, and Huy asks for a count.  The BB is fingering some chips too.. looks big.  Tony announces 69.4k left, Huy flat calls the raise, and the BB now goes into the tank, laying down.

T-J-6 rainbow on board, Huy is taking time and checks.. Tony moves all in, and Huy tanks it again.  Pretty obviously not a trap, unless this is the godmother of all slow-rolls, probably a marginal pair.. maybe 77, 88.. we’ll never know, as Huy mucks it.

Jerry Carter raises Johnny Boy for a huge amount on a K-3-4 twosuit flop… and Johnny lays it down.

UTG moves in with 24.9, Carter puts out two whites for a 50k raise.  Xenia cold calls!  The big blind calls all-in …

Meanwhile, Galen gets the first victim on table 9, doubling up huge with pocket kings. …

… 2-9-3 twosuit, Carter moves all in behind Xenia.. and she looks like she’s calling… she is!  She’s got Jerry covered and shows over ace-king.. split for the side as the board stays raggy and the all-in has pocket queens.. what a golden opportunity for the all-in big blind with QQ, a huge favorite at this point, and he triples up nicely.  Wow.

Buddy Ashmore goes in for 61600, again moving in and again getting no action.  Seven or eight times in a row.  Meanwhile, Johnny Boy on a short stack shows his laydown of an ace in his big blind to an early position raise.  Likely a wise choice.

Again, Buddy moves in again, for 75,200 this time.  Galen is noticeably upset.. Buddy gets called by Shawn, who could reraise to isolate, but just called.. Galen is tanking on the call, commenting like “why did you to that” to Shawn.  Tony and Harvey await behind Galen’s decision… and Galen eventually mucks.. Tony shortly after when he peeks, and Harvey soups.

Buddy has pocket sevens, and Shawn finally caught him with pocket queens.  No improvement and Buddy is out after a great weekend.

Johnny Boy mucks the cutoff, clearly in disgust, Jerry Carter makes a big button push and racks ’em up.

18 players remain.

Huy raises under the gun to 20k, and to a 60k reraise, mucks an ace.  He’s having less success pushing his weight around now that people are firmly and inexoribaly in the money.

Johnny Boy makes a move, and picks up the blinds when he was down to about 30k, in late position.  He appears to have adjusted nicely to his shorter chip position forcing him to be more ‘honest’ in his hand selection.

Jared raises to 20k, Johnny Boy goes over the top for… and Xenia goes all-in too.  Jared is in the tank, debating a call when Kevin goes all in too!!

Jared calls, amazingly enough, with KQ suited.

JB: KK

Jared: KQ

Kevin: QQ

Xenia: 99

Jared flops a diamond draw and hits the flush on the turn.  It’s complete f***ing bedlam.  Four players in for about 100k each.. My instinct is that JB had over 50% equity in the pot, Jared a scant 5%.  It’s straight and flush ONLY to hit. [actually, JB was over 60% but Jaret had a bit over 10%]

DINNER BREAK.

Immediately after the break, pocket kings get yet another kick in the rear as they isolate a raise by pocket sixes, and the 5-7-7-4-8 board makes the straight.

On table 8, Galen raises to 40k and Tony goes over the top.  The TD has to ask Tony several times to push his chips forward to indicate visually that he is all-in.  Tony makes a surprising amount of protest, but does so in the end.  Galen will be losing most of his stack if he makes the call, would certainly be one that people would be eyeballing to be eliminated… and so Galen lets it go, and Tony carefully retrieves the chips he so carefully put out.

While this is going on, Jared makes a huge reraise on the player who had the pocket sixes detailed above.. and eventually releases, then Jared shows aces.  Jared is catching some hot cards now, and with his huge stroke of fortune earlier, is preparing to win the whole thing right now.

Undaunted, it’s a party on Jared’s big blind as ace-two offsuit moves all-in after a couple folds; this is immediately followed by Harvey moving all-in with his queens, and the big stack in the big blind tries to knock two of them out with ace-jack.  Fortunately for him, the ace-deuce has more than Harvey, and the side pot goes to ace-jack as Harvey makes another big gain.

Back on table 9, Huy is again throwing his weight around with an under the gun raise, and Tony moves all-in, actually pushing the chips out without being told to, but is reaching into the pot when making change, and again runs afoul of management..

it’s a call!  Huy has A7s and Tony has AJ offsuit.  Huy calls, and Tony’s hand holds up as the best.  Is it possible that Huy is starting to panic now that people are taking a stand against him?  Although, the reraise still gave Huy approximately 2:1 pot-odds, and he’s not much worse than that as an underdog.

Of note is how Tony taunted Huy into making a call with a “You aren’t going to fold for only this much more, are you?”, much along the taunt he used on yours truly.  Nevertheless, it’s easier to see as a bystander than as a participant.  In the heat of battle, it can be a lot harder.

Kevin Clark eliminates someone else, finding ace-queen offsuit in the big blind when a short stack made a last-gasp raise with QJ offsuit.  An ace on the flop and the turn ices it, and we’re down to twelve.

Tony’s opening raise for 32,000 gets raised for another 23,600.  Tony asks for a count, then asks again, and raises his voice quite sternly when the dealer doesn’t understand that “a count” means “a count of everything in the pot”, not just the raise.  This results in an official verbal warning for his troubles, the next occurrence will lead to a 15 minute penalty.  All this really was for nothing, as pot odds clearly demand a call with anything reasonable, and Tony dutifully calls.  Tony shows JQ offsuit against A9 offsuit by Dave, and ace high makes a wheel on the 5-4-4-3-2 board.

Galen and Huy, meanwhile, continue their rivalry – all fold to Galen who raises in the small blind, and Huy pushes all-in on the big blind for all his chips.  Galen once again is on the defensive, surely he’s thinking he needs to take a stand at some point… but not this time, as Huy takes down a nice pot.

Part VI breaks out, as Galen raises to 50k in the cutoff and Huy smoothcalls on the button.  Flop is AQ5 twosuit, Galen fearlessly pushes in and Huy calls in a hiccup.  Galen turns over pocket jacks and Huy the pocket aces!  Drawing dead to any non-miracle, and running queens would qualify as such.  For all the battles they had, it boiled down to this, and Huy once again plays top hand weakly to catch himself an awesome pot.  Almost 125,000 in total goes off of Galen’s stack, and Huy, who gets my vote as the most dangerous player at the table with a big stack, is back with a big stack.

Galen, perhaps sensing desperation, moves all-in for his last 40k or so, but gets no action despite what appears to be an attempt to look weak by picking up his iPod after his chips go in.

Kevin Clark defends his small blind against Tony, who is new to the table.  Tony bets the Q99 twosuit flop, and Kevin Clark is looking ready to play.. but lets it go, and Tony acquires some more chips, bringing him back to several hundred thousand.

Harvey moves in under the gun, Jared calls and another caller comes in too, he and Jared are betting up the side.

The flop comes 8-7-5 rainbow, Jared folds to a 50k bet, and Harvey’s kings outlast the pocket queens that went up against him.  Harvey survives again, making about four or five all-ins at this point.  Even as a favorite, you still need to be lucky to win em all, and Harvey has been.

Tony raises to 32k on the button, SB with the QQ las ttime calls.  He bets 25k into Tony on an A-T-7 board, and after a good glaredown, mucks his hand.

Meanwhile Galen moves all-in, Shawn calls in the SB

Shawn: AQ

Galen: 99

Flop with a queen, queen on the river, and Galen is eliminated in twelfth, unable to comeback from losing that major clash with Huy.  With the elimination of Galen, the one person determined to take a stand against Huy’s aggression, look for Huy to start picking up steam.

Jay makes a raise on the button, the big blind shows his mucked Q9o, and Jay shows his 3-2!  I apologize for not getting down whether it was suited or not, as you are no doubt aware, this is the most important part of the hand, just ask anyone in a 4-8 game.

Hubris is the key word.  Showing you can bluff at the time you don’t want action.. if you can do it, it works great.

Down to five handed on table 9, Shawn figured his ace-X was good enough for a raise, but when the big blind found ace-ace, the rockets held up.

X raises Kevin Clark’s small blind to 30k, he and Jared call.  9-6-K rainbow, check twice to raiser.  X is having a think.. does he suspect he’s being baited?  Checked.. twoflushing 4 on the turn, K.C. bets 60k and picks up the pot.  The tension is being felt out to the crowd, as each pot won is getting sporadic, awkward applause from friends on the rail.

Don gains the ignominious honor of going on the final-table bubble, making a move with ace-king offsuit and running into David Hung’s pocket aces right behind.  With an ace and a king gone from the deck, your chances of running into such a premium pair or only a couple percent, but as any gambler can tell you, sometimes two percent is a big number, as it was today.

Day #11: Introducing “Zurich Stud”.

Now that we’ve had our fill of craps for now, it’s time to bust out another home game.

This baby made its debut during my most recent trip to Calgary, and reception has been mostly positive.  I don’t suspect it would get played without me picking it, but I still have a soft spot for it because it’s so very different, but still reasonably sane.

For indeed, where most poker games require you to get either the highest and/or the lowest possible hand, this is the first game I can think of where the object is to have the middle hand.

Rules:

• Each player antes one unit.
• Each player receives one card face-down and one card, face-up
• Beginning with the middle-most open card (erring towards the lower of the two middle-most cards in case of an even number of players), that player may check or bet, in multiples of one unit.
• After all bets are resolved, each remaining hand gets a second face-up card.
• Another betting round beginning with the middle-most card (as described above), in multiples of one unit.
• Each remaining hand gets a third face-up card.
• Another betting round as above, but in multiples of two units.
• Each remaining hand gets a fourth face-up card.
• One final betting round, in multiples of two units.
• How the showdown is resolved depends on the number of players in the pot.
  • If there are two players remaining in the pot, they split the pot
  • If there are any other even number of players remaining in the pot, the two middle-most ranking hands split the pot
  • If there is an odd number of players remaining in the pot, five random cards are dealt to a “Larry hand” to make an even number, and then the two middle-most ranking hands split the pot.  If Larry is one of those two hands, put his half into the pot, everyone ante’s again, keep the dealer button where it is, and deal another hand.

Some notes:

• If at any point in the hand, there are only two players remaining, all action stops and the two survivors split the pot.
• Ties are broken by suit.  Clubs is the lowest suit, then Diamonds, then Hearts, then Spades is the highest.
• Aces are always high.

Ratings:

• Power level: 3/10.. more or less.  This doesn’t really apply here, does it?  Well, it kinda does.  If you know what it takes for a typical hand to be considered widely the best in five card stud, you can work from there, and that’s what I’d peg five card stud as, a 3/10.  Anyways, long story short: two pair or higher can figure to be right out of the running as being too high, and a hand with four low cards will need almost the perfect card to be in contention on fifth street.
• Sanity Level: 2/10.  Most times when playing, people couldn’t really get a bead on where they stood.  Even the winning hand range shifts as the number of players change, and the potential for a visit from Larry gums up a lot of thinking at the showdown.
• Action Level: 8/10.  When you are down to three or four people on a later street, and one of them clearly catches bad, you can expect some strong betting in an effort to eliminate them from contention.  When it gets down to three-handed on 4th street, even a slight perception of weakness (or, I guess, excessive strength) can prompt the other two players to independently make a (correct) whipsaw attempt to extract maximum value.

General notes:

• In general, it is a lot harder to know if you’re hand is good than it is to know if it’s bad.  That is, it’s fairly easy to see if you’re in the running as the chips start flying, but you really can’t do much better than that.  On the other hand, if you have a large pair on 3rd street, you are almost certainly toast.  If it’s a split pair (say, [K]2K or [A]6A), you have an outside chance at running a bluff if others catch bad, but if it’s an open pair, forget about it.
• Just remember that even the highest or lowest hand in a three-handed 5th street betting war can always Larry into half the pot.  Basic knowledge of five card stud probabilities can help you with the decision “how likely is Larry to save me?”.  Depending on the pot size, you might just be correct to cross your fingers and vote for the Larrymeister, especially if you can approximate the chance he’ll squeak in there and throw half the pot back into contention.

As always, if you find this game enjoyable and give it a crack at your next home game, shoot me a line and let me know how it was received.

Day #10 (whoops) Learning Craps, part #4 of #4.

Hey folks, my sincere apologies for missing a day.  In fine bureaucratic fashion, I’ll just have to extend this to the 22nd.  Someday, future blogologists will dig this one up and imagine grand theories about the “legend of post #9”.  And yes, I strongly suspect “blogology” will be a thing.

In no particular order, here are some random tidbits on the game.

Helping those who help make the game go smooth:

Here’s an important question: “How do I tip the dealers at craps?”

In blackjack, as you know, I recommend giving a direct tip of 10% of your bet unit every time you get a natural.  This will result in an average of around one half a bet every two hours, or about 100% of your expected loss.

If you are playing optimal strategy at craps off a $5 unit (or $3 with greater than 3-4-5 odds), I recommend making a $5 or $6 place bet for the crew on the point once per stick change.  This winds up being between $15 and $18 an hour, and if you’re playing in this fashion you will be making a LOT of bets.  A neat little shortcut to remember is that, if you are playing optimal strategy, every roll of the dice costs you 7 cents for every $5 your unit is.  Actually, “neat” might be less accurate than “sobering” or “depressing”.  But if you’re at a table with a good craps crew, you’ll be seeing around 200 rolls an hour, and that $15-$18 is reasonably close to that expected loss.  It’s a little higher, but craps is a much tougher game to deal, and hey, you have three dealers at one table.  If anything, I expect to hear about how I’m not recommending enough.

Now you might ask yourself, “didn’t Five Card Charlie just recommend never making place bets”?  Yes, that is true, but there are a couple points that make it a different barrel of fish when tipping:

#1) On any tip you bet for the crew, the house edge is 100% because it gets collected by the crew when it wins anyways.

#2) If you try and make an equivalent sized pass/come with odds, this irritant in point #1 can rear its head during those streaks where you get several rolls without a point.

#3) If you give the crew anything less than full odds, while virtually all dealers will still be grateful you are tipping at a fair clip, there will be that odd bad apple in the barrel who will actually be offended that you aren’t taking full odds for the crew, and may even hustle you to do so.  Zero tolerance for tip hustling is still too high.  One less chance for a myopic dealer to ruin the experience.

If you are playing the Iron Cross, every time you get a “bonus” winner on the Field (i.e. the 2 or 12 roll), place $1 for the crew along with your field, and put it back up until your first field loss.

On average, you will tip $1.80 every 18 rolls, which winds up being about $21.60 per hour.  A bit higher, but since you’re a beginner, you’re likely drawing more attention from the crew so it’s likely worth it.

Of course, if you feel like being more or less generous, these hit rates can be adjusted.  But this would be my recommendation.

Hands up!:

When the dice are being pushed towards the shooter, get your hands out of the dice shooting area.  If the dice carom off your hands and the shooter sevens out, you will be under the most withering of scorn from the other players.  Yes, yes, I know.. doesn’t make a difference.  Again, this is just the way the game is played.  It’s like pro wrestling needs a little suspension of disbelief, right?  Same thing here.

How to throw the dice:

One hand on the dice.  Do not close your hand on them until just the moment you’re ready to release.  Use a simple low, flat roll and aim to hit the ribbed alligator mesh on the opposite side.  Do not think that just because all eyes are on you, you need an elaborate windup and delivery that would make Fred Flintstone’s bowling ball blush.  If you don’t get them to the back wall, you will be mocked and ridiculed much like those on The Price Is Right who could not get the bonus wheel around one complete revolution.  Depending on the place, they may require you to relinquish control of the dice early to the next player.

No roll!:

The following occurrences will result in a roll being declared void by the officious looking chap sitting in front of all the money:

• At least one dice lands outside the table.  If this happens and it’s nearest to you, pick up the dice and directly hand it to the employee who will come looking for it too.  Don’t throw or toss it into the table.  Feel free to dust off afterwards for bonus marks.
• At least one dice lands in the chip rail around the edge.  If this happens near you, place it face down on the table and the stickman will bring it back in
• A die that is about to leave the table is swatted back into play.  If it hits you while you are stationary, it’s fine; if you make any attempt to direct the dice into the table, no roll.
• At least one die lands cocked between any two piles of chips on the table, or (though rare) against a chip stack and the rear bumper.  If a die is cocked against only one surface, the die that is read is the one that would be face-up if the impediment were removed.
• In a uniquely Manitoban experience, both dice must cross the center and at least one must hit the back wall, or it’s no roll.  They need the ability to go to instant replay, if you will, to determine if a roll was (or should have been) “no roll”.  This is either to Manitoba’s eternal shame or eternal credit, depending on your point of view.

One more thing — perhaps the most important one:

Have fun.  It’s one of the greatest traditional casino games.  And while embracing the wild superstitions are part of the experience, it should only be in fun.  Gently razzing, or even half-heartedly blaming a shooter for doing a “no no” that “caused” the shooter to seven out is one thing.  But to legitimately get bent out of shape because someone said a certain word, or they slowed down the ‘vibe’ of the game, or the dice hit their armhair?  Foolishness.  Remember my comparison to professional wrestling above, and the equivalent need to ‘suspend disbelief’?  Well, getting legitimately bent out of shape over superstition is right up their with being genuinely upset that your favorite wrestler ‘lost’, if you catch my drift.

… and so, that’s it.  Welcome to the wide world of craps.  Throughout the blog, I’ll have other silly craps stories, and even if you don’t decide to play the game, hopefully you’ll understand them a little bit better.

Another house poker game goes up tomorrow, stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

 

 

Day #8 – Learning Craps, part #3 (now of 4, a.k.a. “Assorted crap”)

Alright folks, this one’s been a big one, so I really appreciate you sticking with me through it.  As discussed earlier, you already know the “optimal strategy” (such as it could best be called) for playing craps.  You will get as much action as you could possibly handle, with a house edge in the tenths of percent — or even smaller!

There are still a few other bets to cover.  Some are useful for a couple of other purposes, including the only Five Card Charlie approved alternate beginner strategy.  Yes, it has an overall larger expected loss, but it has a lot less variance, so it can be useful if trying to play on a budget.  The others are useful mostly to give yourself a good chuckle, when you realize how large the house edges are and how much action they get.

Finally, we’ll close off with matters of etiquette, to help get you through your first experience unscathed.  Or, at most, sufficiently scathed to make you want to come back for more.

Place Bets:

Rather than make a Come bet, and wait for the next roll in your game to see what number it goes to, you can place a bet directly on one of the six point numbers.  Of course, the payout can’t be paid at true odds, otherwise the house would have no advantage on them.

When placing the 4 or 10, as we know you are a 2:1 underdog, but the place bet only pays at a rate of 9:5.  Now, unlike the Pass Line wagers, you can take the place bet down any time you wish, but since we are measuring the house edge on the Pass Line with the assumption that it remains in play until resolved, we will do the same with the place bets.

When you place the 4 or 10, it wins at a rate of 1.8 to 1 (that is, 9:5 divided by 5), meaning that, on average, you will have 3 wins of 1.8 units for every 6 losses of 1 unit.  Average result: (3 * 1.8 – 6 * 1.0) / (3 + 6) = 0.6 / 9 = 6.67%

A place bet on the 5 or 9 pays at a rate of 7:5, or 1.4 to 1.  On average, you have 4 wins of 1.4 units for every 6 losses of 1 unit, for an average of (4 * 1.4 – 6 * 1.0) / (4 + 6) = 0.4 / 10 = 4.00%

A place bet on the 6 or 8 pays at a rate of 7:6, and with similar calculations, we see the house edge is 1.52%

Notice, incidentally, that all of these are much higher than the house edges on the Pass Line or Come, even if you take no odds at all.  You will occasionally hear criticism that Pass Line / Come is weaker because “you need to roll the number twice to win”.  The correct answer to that is “yes, but with Pass Line / Come, you need to roll the number once to lose”.  In other words, yes, if you place every number, it only needs to hit once to win.. but if the next roll out of the gate is “that one”, all six of his bets will lose, whereas you will only lose your Pass Line bet, and in fact win even money on your Come bet (as “its first roll” was a winner).

Buy Bets:

The good news: buy bets pay true odds.

The bad news: You must pay a 5% commission for the privilege.

In all cases, your total bet is 1.05 units.  The 1 unit that pays at true odds, no house edge; the 0.05 units is lost.  Total house edge: 0.05 / 1.05 = 4.76%; simply worse than place bets on anything but the 4 and 10, equally simply worse than Pass and Come bets.

Field Bet:

At first, this is a very tempting looking wager.  After all, it covers so many numbers, how bad could it be?

Thanks to the tables we calculated in Part 2, however, we can determine just how big our chances are.  All those winning numbers (2-3-4-9-10-11-12) add up to a total of 16 combinations out of 36.  Even with the standard bonuses of a 2 paying double and a 12 paying triple (or the other way around), that’s only 19 units won for every 20 lost over every 36 rolls, or a house edge of 1/36 = 2.78%

Note that some casinos only pay double on the 2 and 12, which gives a house edge twice as big; 2 units lost every 36 rolls = 5.56% house edge.

Big 6, 8:

Remember how placing bets on the 6 and 8 work?  You get paid 7:6 if you win.  Big 6 and Big 8 pay even money.  So why would you ever place them?  Because you’re a drunk frat boy trying to show your trophy lady that “of COURSE I know how to play honey, watch this!”?  Because you have really stubby arms?  It’s a bet so bad, a number of casinos (to their eternal credit) don’t even offer them.

Everything in the middle:

Absolute dross, one and all.  Most are self explanatory, you’re betting on the very next roll of the dice.  These are absolute sucker bets.  House edges closing in on double-digit percentages.  If anyone gives you any advice that involves the center bets, you can immediately discount it for that very reason.

In fact, I even feel dirty for acknowledging that those sucker bets exist.  Moving on:

The Five Card Charlie alternate strategy: “The Iron Cross”

Now, please don’t think that I’m advocating a strategy that will give you an overall advantage over the house at craps. It will not, and in fact, your average expected loss is substantially higher than Pass Line with Come bets.  On the other hand, this method is by farthe ‘cheapest’ way to cover all the numbers and get a result on each and every roll.  By “cheapest”, I mean you can reasonably expect to play all night on a $5 table with this system using a $300 session bankroll.  If you were to play $5 with the ‘optimal’ strategy, you should be packing a minimum $1k and expect 2 out of every 3 hours to feature you either up or down several hundred dollars.  In other words, using the “Iron Cross” instead of the optimal strategy, the following will happen:

• Your overall average expected loss per session will be noticeably larger.
• Your overall involvement in the game will be muchgreater — there will be NO rolls where nothing happens.
• Your typical evening’s “worst case loss” will be, overall, somewhat smaller.
• Your typical evening’s “best case win” will be, overall, muchsmaller.

There’s some truth in advertising, huh?  Hey, what can I say, that’s just how I roll — oh wait, I used that pun already.  Anyways, on to the Iron Cross.  This assumes a $5 minimum.  If it’s a $10 minimum, double all the numbers; if it’s a $15 minimum, triple them, and so forth.

• Before the first roll, make a $5 place bet on the 5, and a $6 place bet on the 6 and 8.  Tell the dealer you “want them always working on the come out roll” (I’ll explain this later)
• On every roll, bet $5 on the field.

That’s it.  The simplicity explains why it’s the single most popular “system” for craps.  And as advertized, you really do win money on any roll but The S-Word.  Of course, your inevitable losses more than compensate for your small wins.  Note that when you lose, you lose the Field ($5) and three place bets ($5, $6 and $6).  That’s a $24 loss when you lose, on 6 of the 36 combinations.  On the other rolls, you win:

2: $10

3, 4, 9, 10, 11: $5

5, 6, 8: $2 (your place bets with $7 but your Field bet loses $5, for a net $2 loss)

12: $15

Multiplying each win by the number of combinations on the dice gives us, every 36 rolls, ($123 – $144) / 36 = -$21 every 36 rolls = $0.58 per roll.

Is it worth having action on every roll for 58 cents per roll?  It’s the cheapest way to do it on a $5 table, that’s for sure.  Overall, this represents a 2.66% house advantage on your $22 wager per roll.  Granted, that was certainly unacceptable during the Rat Pack days where casinos used low edges (as opposed to barely clothed and barely competent dealers in mind-numbing ‘Party Pits’) to attract customers.  By today’s standards, this is a reasonable edge given how much action you’re getting.

My advice: if you are still apprehensive about craps and the vast amount of action, bring a couple hundred dollars and play the Iron Cross for an hour or two, and observe what’s going on.  You’ll limit your exposure, you’ll get a chance to throw (for which you’ll have to make a Pass Line bet, and please promise me you’ll at least take single odds on it!) and you’ll get used to craps and its unique nature.  As soon as your comfortable, go to the optimal strategy.  Pass Line with full odds, and as many Come bets as you can stomach.

My other advice: come back tomorrow for what I promise is genuinely the conclusion to this series.  We’ll talk about craps etiquette, slang, funny stories, and my recommended ways to tip the dealers — remember, casino dealing is a tipped profession, it has the concomitant reduced minimum wage, and especially in craps, the difference between a mediocre dealer and a great one will vastly improve your experience.  If you can afford to gamble, just as ‘if you can afford to eat at a sit-down restaurant’, you can afford to tip.

All this etiquette in our grand finale — see you all tomorrow!

Day #7: Learning Craps, part 2.

Greetings, programs!  When last we left, we had distilled the hideously gigantic craps layout into two tiny parts (the Pass Line and the Don’t Pass line) and with a few simple rules, showed how to get one of the best gambles in the whole casino.  Believe it or not, we can do even better — what if I told you that, depending on your stomach for fortune’s vagaries (.. and your bankroll), you could get the house edge on craps to below 0.03%?

The secret is what’s known as the “odds bet”, so called because it pays out at exactly true odds.  To explain what is meant by that, we’ll need to look at the odds themselves.

If you take two dice, what are your chances of rolling “The S-Word” (if that made you imagine Sean Connery bellowing out “SABER!”, you are officially awesome) on any given roll?  Well, there are 6 possible choices for die #1 (1-6) and 6 possible choices for dice #2 (also 1-6), and you multiply them together to get 36 possible outcomes.  They are, by total:

• 2: 1-1 (Total: 1)
• 3: 1-2, 2-1 (Total: 2)
• 4: 1-3, 2-2, 3-1 (Total: 3)
• 5: 1-4, 2-3, 3-2, 4-1 (Total: 4)
• 6: 1-5, 2-4, 3-3, 4-2, 5-1 (Total: 5)
• The average of six and eight: 1-6, 2-5, 3-4, 4-3, 5-2, 6-1 (Total: 6)
• 8: 2-6, 3-5, 4-4, 5-3, 6-2 (Total: 5)
• 9: 3-6, 4-5, 5-4, 6-3 (Total: 4)
• 10: 4-6, 5-5, 6-4 (Total: 3)
• 11: 5-6, 6-5 (Total: 2)
• 12: 6-6 (Total: 1)

So, let’s say your first roll is either a 4 or a 10.  That is now your point, and you must repeat that number before sevening out (the onlycontext in which it is acceptable to say that word.  Hey, I don’t write the rules, I just report them) to win on the Pass Line.  What are your odds of winning?

As we can see, you have 3 combinations that win and 6 combinations that lose, so your odds of winning are 6:3 against, or 2:1 against.

So, you make the odds bet — and if you’re doing it Five Card Charlie style, you alwaysmake the maximum allowed odds bet! — by placing it behind your bet on the pass line; if your bet wins, your Pass Line bet gets paid even money (as detailed above) but your odds bet gets paid at 2:1, since you were a 2:1 underdog.

If the point were 5 or 9, you would be a 3:2 underdog (6 combinations against : 4 combinations 4), and your odds would pay 3:2.  If the point were 6 or 8, you would be a 6:5 underdog and your odds would pay 6:5.

If you were betting on the Don’t Pass, you would be the favorite, so you would be laying a bigger amount to win a smaller amount.  So when the point is 4 or 10, you must put up $2 for every $1 you want to win, as you are the 2:1 favorite.  5 or 9, you must put up $3 for every $2 and 6 or 8, you must put up $6 for every $5.

Now, as you probably guessed, the house has zero advantage on these odds bets, so they must naturally limit the amount you are allowed to take on these.  The original maximum amount was equal to your Pass Line bet, or if playing the Don’t Pass, the maximum would be whatever amount would result in a win equal to your Don’t Pass — on a $100 bet, you could lay $200 odds when the point is 4 or 10, $150 odds when the point is 5 or 9, and $120 odds when the point is 6 or 8.

Gradually casinos started offering “double odds” (double the standard maximum), then “triple odds”.  3x-4x-5x (3x on the 4 and 10, 4x on the 5 and 9, 5x on the 6 and 8) is fairly standard on the Vegas Strip.  The Fiesta Henderson (a Five Card Charlie favorite when he must go to Nevada) offers 10x.  The Casino Royale offers 20x, or 100x if you are playing $5 or more.

The house edge on your ‘combined’ wager depends on what odds you take, as follows:

• 1x: 0.85%
• 2x: 0.61%
• 3x: 0.47%
• 3-4-5x: 0.37%
• 5x: 0.33%
• 10x: 0.18%
• 20x: 0.10%
• 100x: 0.02%

These are some seriously low house edges, comparable only to blackjack (where even without varying your bet, knowing some basic card counting can get the house edge well under 0.5%) and is essentially why most Vegas casinos won’t comp you dinky doo for craps play unless you make the various sucker bets.  That’s okay.  Five Card Charlie style leaves you enough money to pay your own way when you need to, and if the place comps you well anyways(see the aforementioned Fiesta Henderson and the Washington Gold chain), that’s just gravy.

Finally, you might decide you want even more action.  Let’s say your first roll is a 5, so that’s your point.  You now want to be able to win money on other numbers coming up, but you want a nice, cheap way to do it without having to resort to sucker bets.  The answer is the “Come Bet”.  Yes, yes, stop snickering.  I did warn you that craps is a sophomoric and prurient game, didn’t I?

When you make the Come bet, the very next roll will be considered the “first roll” for that bet.  It’s like starting another game within a game.  Now, I’ve got my Pass Line waiting for me to repeat a 5, and I take maximum odds because that’s the Five Card Charlie way.  My next roll is a 6.

They will now move my Come bet into the giant “SIX” square in the middle of the felt.  I can now take full odds on that as well.  Now, if a 5 comes I win my Pass Line, and if a 6 comes, my Come bet wins.

You can keep putting Come bets out once the point is established, and I maintain that’s the only way to roll, no pun intended.  They will keep moving your money up to new numbers (or just paying you the profit if you already had that number) as long as you keep rolling.  Eventually, you’ll have money on the other 5 point numbers, and they’ll just keep handing you money until you seven out.. and then you lose everything. It’s the most depressing sight in a casino.  The dealers just stacking up chips everywhere, hand over fist.  They may as well open the middle of the table like a garbage chute and let them plummet down.

Trust me, that will happen 99 times out of 100, but the 1 in 100 time you roll for a half an hour or more, even though it won’t make up for it financially, it willmake up for it mentally.  It will make you feel invincible.  It will feel, as Red Foreman said, as if God were bending the laws of probability just for you.

There areother, less efficient ways to get your money on the numbers.  For the sake of completeness, we’ll touch on them in Part #3.  But for now, you know literally 99% of what you need to know to gamble in one of the most exciting and least expensive ways imaginable.  You can follow in the footsteps of some of the greatest gamblers in the Rat Pack era.

if nothing else, I’ve empowered you to make sense of those billboards all over Vegas where casinos advertize the odds they offer at craps — between that and the ability to nit-pick gambling scenes at movies, even if you don’t feel like actually BEING a Rat Pack era gambler, you can sure fake it with the best of them.

See you all tomorrow!

Day #6 – Learning craps, Part #1 (insert Taco-Tuesday-At-School joke here).

Yes, I know it’s sophmoric.  Yes, I also know it’s actually Thursday.  I can’t help myself.

Dan Lubin, creator of EZ Pai Gow as played in fine casinos around the world, has long suggested that I should devote some blog time to some “how to” posts for learning table games, and provide strategies of various ‘seriousness’.  I like to think my writing has a conversational tone that would be useful in this regards, and if nothing else, I can’t pass on a chance to finally bring my crippling combination of Asperger’s-like fastidiousness and verbal diarrhea into a better light.

The reason I started with craps is primarily because it can be very intimidating for new players.  It has its own superstitions, its own rubric, even its own slang. It moves at an incredibly fast pace.  The table itself is large and imposing.  Well, except for those little one-man ‘tubs’.  A bowl that small is only useful for one kind of craps, see above for more details.

And, oh yeah, the layout is pretty damn intimidating.

To a new player, this probably appears somewhere in complexity between a circuit board and a fatal explosion at the local number factory.  The astute of you will notice along the bottom that “any crap” pays 8:1.  Trust me, one hour at the table, you’ll come to realize that it’s the game, not me, with the issues here.

Anyways — first thing to realize is that this table is symmetrical — same bets on either side.  So, let’s trim this down…

Hey, no complaining about the rectangular crop!  We just graduated to multimedia here, go easy on me.  Yes, I’ll need a graphic artist some day, thank you for asking.

Still intimidated?  We’ll do the basics in 5 seconds, and to do the basics, you only need to look at one area:

Seriously.  That’s where 99% of what you need to know takes place.  What exactly takes place depends entirely on what the very first roll of the game is.

• On the first roll of the game, if you roll a 7 or an 11, you win even money, and a new game starts; you get to roll again.
• On the first roll of the game, if you roll a 2, 3 or 12, you lose, and a new game starts; you get to roll again.
• On the first roll of the game, if you roll a 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10, that number becomes your “point”.  You then have as many additional rolls as necessary until one of two things happens:
  1. You roll the point, in which case you win even money, and a new game starts; you get to roll again.
  2. You roll a seven, in which case you lose, and a new game starts; the player to your left now gets to shoot.

Now, you can see that seven undergoes a major transformation.  On the first roll, it’s a winner; on every other roll, it’s consummate evil.  You will see why later on in Part 2; for now, suffice it to say that the vast majority of Seven’s life is its evil side.  To the point where you do not even dare say the word ‘seven’.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a rat’s ass if you do, but it is thoroughly entrenched in craps superstition.  It’s like in Fight Club.  The first rule of craps is that you do not say the word ‘seven’.  The second rule of craps is that you do not say the word ‘seven’.

Want to know how serious it is?  The reason they call eleven ‘yo’ instead of ‘eleven’ is because it rhymeswith ‘seven’.  I kid you not.  The name so evil, you dare not even rhymewith it — poor Fezzik wouldn’t last a day.

The other line to pay attention to is very closely related:

See everything we did above?  If you bet on the Don’t Pass, the exact opposite thing happens — you win when the pass line would lose, and vice versa — with one exception; if you roll a 12 on the first roll of the game, while the Pass Line loses, the Don’t Pass Line merely pushes.  That’s what the “Bar 6-6” means: bar the payment on the boxcars.  A lot of people are confused as to why “Pass” gets a ‘line’ while “Don’t Pass’ gets a ‘bar’.  It’s the verb, not the noun.

Finally, you might ask yourself, “how do they know if it’s the first roll of a game or not?”, if not “how do they know what the point was?”.  Two good questions, both answered by use of a puck (the only puck I’m apparently going to see drop all year &(#$)*&%)#*($ hockey strike) that has two sides:

When the first roll is starting, the puck will be on the “off” position, placed in the “Don’t Come Bar 6-6” spot (we’ll get into that tomorrow); when the player establishes his point number by starting a game with a 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10, the puck is flipped to the “on” position and placed on the number that is the point.

Now, there’s still a lot more to go, but you already know enough to play a game with one of the lowest house advantages (1.41% for Pass Line, 1.36% for Don’t Pass — and we’ll see tomorrow how they get even lower!) and, most importantly, you know enough to suffer along with me in one of my biggest pet peeves.

The next time you watch a gambling-themed movie with a scene where they are playing craps, there is money all over the table and the puck is “ON”, watch what happens if the guy throwing the dice rolls That Number Which Shall Not Be Said.

Dollars to dimes, everyone at the table will cheer like mad, and the guys behind the table will start dishing out money.  That grating sound you will hear, coming from around the geographic center of North America, will be me gnashing my teeth in despair.  Even if I’m not watching the movie, trust me.  I’ll know.

Best part is, now you can suffer right along with me.

Part #2 up tomorrow.

Day #5 – Never give up! Never surrender!

Today’s post is a “tale from the felt” kind of post — see how desperate I am to keep a mixture of things running? — from last night’s poker session in Winnipeg.

You may have heard me rant about Winnipeg’s poker scene in the past.  Highest rake in North America (1/2 NL yet 10% rounded up to $5 max) combined with lowest comps (you can get a comped soda about every four hours).  Granted, a HUGE part of this is due undoubtedly to our in-casino McDonalds along with what I could only ascribe to general governmental parsimony.  The tournament scene, however, has been growing much better, to the point where we now have settled on three weekly evening tournaments and a few major events a year, and it was indeed my favorite event, the Tuesday rebuy event.  $60 for T500 in chips to start, with $20 rebuys for an additional T500 and a $30 add-on for T1,000 at the end.

The funny thing is, most people see this as being much “pricier” as the Wednesday or Thursday “freeze-outs”, but when you consider those freeze-outs have the ubiquitous “re-entry rule” (a.k.a. your typical “I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Rebuy Event!” rebuy event) they’re essentially the same format, but more expensive — the Tuesday events are far cheaper.

For whatever reason, this dynamic seems to divide people into two camps: those who treat them like they’re more expensive and try and avoid a rebuy at any cost, and those who go overboard with the rebuy mentality.  Net result, paying attention to people allows for glorious opportunities to either fold your AK preflop or reraise all-in for 40x with no fold equity, if you catch my drift.

Yes, there’s still the ever-annoying Winnipeg poker player habits that I’ve ranted about.  The special tonight was watching someone go into the tank to a pot-sized turn bet, then do the standard “20 Questions” bullshit before triumphantly folding his unimproved ace-high gutshot straight draw, as if he was folding two pair.  Boy oh boy, that AJ on a 7-Q-K-Q double-flush draw board is reeeeeally tight stuff there.  Such a hero fold, they’ll retroactively rename your grandpa ‘Achilles’.  And of course, the same old absolutely pathetic stop-and-gos.  I get when it’s a reasonable looking play, but the addiction some people have is insane.  I can only really conclude that, at some day now enshrined in Winnipeg poker lore, someone bet $5 into a $4,705 pot and induced a fold.  But yes, there were two calls for over 90% of a stack preflop followed by leading out onto the flop.

A new one came across my eyes last night, however.  And maybe you can correct me if this is far more universal than I’m giving this credit for.

But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, do Winnipeg poker players give up way too early in the hand.

Exhibit A: I catch someone trying an all-in squeeze play with ace-five.  Turn over my ace-jack.  He’s got his coat on his shoulder.

Flop comes king-three-three.  He’s got his coat over his other shoulder now.

Turn comes with a queen.  He’s turning his back from the table, despite my loud, dry intonations of “CHOP, CHOP..”, like I was Alan Rickman trying to hurry someone up.

Yup.  Come back to the table, get your half of the chips, sir.  It happened twice again, once with pair-over-pair preflop and overpair vs top boat on the turn.  In both cases, the players were actually out of their seat before the hands ended and had to be called back.

As a public service to such Winnipeg poker players, who may at most be simply exhibiting a layman’s difficulty in parsing very small or very large probabilities, here are some common gambling experiences that will explain just how “not drawing dead” you are:

#1) Ace-five vs ace-jack suited preflop.  Approximate chance of winning or chopping: 24.6% + 8.1% = 32.7%.  About as likely as you are to double down on 11 and get 21 (30.8%); how often does that happen in a night of blackjack?  Plenty.
#2) underpair versus overpair preflop.  Approximate chance of winning or chopping: about 19.7%.  About as likely as a dealer busting a ten value card (21.2%), and how often does that happen in a night of blackjack?  Plenty.
#3) overpair versus top boat on turn.  Approximate chance of winning or chopping: about 4.6%.  About as likely as being dealt a natural blackjack (4.7%), and how often does that happen in a night of blackjack?  Plenty.

Of course, the blackjack metaphor is deliberate, because that is actually a game where one does, on occasion, surrender.  When I get to that point in the blogging advent, you’ll see that it’s not actually a wimpy “giving up of the ghost”, but an aggressive move selling a hand worth 40-ish cents on the dollar and getting 50-cents on the dollar.

But in poker, unless you are drawing dead on the flop (very difficult to do, usually involves flopping quads or a Royal), you have no reason to give up before you.  When the dealer mucks your cards, and you are sure he didn’t make a mistake, then you can put your coat on.

Unless you’re playing strip poker, then you can take your coat off.  Or whatever.

Day #4: $1,600 flushed out right from under me.

Time to try out the “rambling narrative” type of post.  After all, it is not a question about whether or not every gambler on Earth has stories to tell.  We all do; whether we have told them or not is strictly a matter of self-control, not of intent.  A curious phenomenon is that they virtually all involve a tale of money lost.  For whatever reason, tales of substantial wins just don’t resonate as deeply.  That’s likely a testament to the psychology of the gambler more than any case of being inherently more memorable.  I’ll leave such stereotype analysis to the experts; I’m only here to engage in the stereotype itself.

Those of you out there who play Canada’s national sports lotteries might not be aware of just how rocky a start they got off to.  One of their original options was pulled within the first month due to it getting heavily pummeled by sports betting sharps from down south.  They also set their betting lines in concrete a week in advance, which given how easily a random injury can occur to a star player, surely speaks for itself as to how stupid an idea it is.

While the “pick the straight up winner” was mostly worth ignoring (it had and still has a ‘thirty-cent’ line, meaning that the lines were set so that picking a coin toss would pay 70 cents per $1 bet), the totals betting, or “Over/Under”, was an absolute gold mine.  Not just because they set the totals a week in advance (Detroit vs Pittsburgh in 1992 is over/under 9.5 and Lemieux is injured [again!] — Smells Like Under), not just because they were WAY off in how they set their lines sometimes, but because they didn’t do a little basic math and accidentally gave the player the best gamble in sports if they were willing to book a little risk.

You had to pick between 3 and six games over/under correctly, and the higher number of games you picked, the better the payout.  The payouts were (but are nowhere near as good now) as follows:

3/3: 5-for-1
4/4: 10-for-1
5/5: 20-for-1
6/6: 40-for-1

Notice how, after you play the first three games, adding another game to your ticket halves your chance of winning but doubles your payout.  This is equivalent to “free odds” in craps or the “double up” in video poker.

It stands to reason, then that your odds are at their best when playing six games.  But just how do you express this?  By figuring out what accuracy rate you needed to break even.  And to do that, we need a little boring math.  Please bear with me.  If you must, let your eyes glaze over until I get your attention with the take-away.

Let P be your probability of winning any given game, and N be the number of games on the ticket.  Your chance of picking all N games correctly is P^N, and to be breakeven, P^N * Payout = 1; hopefully it’s intuitive that if you have a 1-in-5 chance of getting a 5-unit winner, it’s a breakeven gamble.

So, solving P^N * Payout = 1, we get P^N = 1 / Payout, or P = the N-th root of the payout.

On the three spot ticket, we have P = 3rd root of 5 = 0.5848…., meaning if you pick games at a 58.48% accuracy on a 3-game ticket, you will break even, which you can verify by cubing the result.

Repeating the calculations, we get:

P (4 spot) = 56.23%
P (5 spot) = 54.93%
P (6 spot) = 54.07%

… and what makes this significant?  Well, if you bet a single game in Vegas with the (then-standard, maybe still now) ten-cent line, you would have to risk $1.10 to win $1.00, so your needed accuracy is easily calculable as $1.10 / ($1.10 + $1.00) = 52.38%

HEY YOU WITH THE GLAZED OVER EYES!  SNAP OUT OF IT!

Here’s the takeaway: you only needed to be 1.7% more accurate against a line that was badly set for up to a week in advance.  In retrospect, it’s kind of sad I only made a few hundred dollars profit off this in high school, which included a sadly necessary 10% service fee to one of the 18 year old students I knew to handle these for me.  I can only imagine how much money the savage, well-oiled professional sports betting types made off this.

I, too, should have made a lot more off this.  And I would have too, had it not been for one particular ticket.

Flush off yet another success and having parlayed $2 into $80, I had really liked next week’s lines.  The cornerstone of this was a game between Calgary and the San Jose Sharks, mysteriously set at 7.5 goals.  It was the first year in the league for the Sharks, and man oh man did it show.  Plus, Calgary was completely and thoroughly snake-bit on offense.  Other two meetings this year were a 4-3 Sharks win (October 8th, 1991) and a 2-1 Sharks win (November 30th, 1991).  I was actually worried about other games on the ticket.

So, I picked the best ones I could elsewhere and watched.  I forget what the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday games were, but I had my last three on Wednesday, and I do remember them well.

Boston and Montreal, under 5.5 — they had finally started lowering the bar a bit for tough defensive teams.  Two Adams division teams, seems like an auto-lock.  Final score: 3-2.  Piece of cake.

Winnipeg and Edmonton, under 7.5; this one worried the hell out of me when the friggin Jets’ started doing the scoring, and I was expecting a blowout.  Final score: 5-2 Winnipeg.  Wasn’t scared for a second.

At this point, San Jose is up 1-0 on Calgary at the end of the first.  Jeff Hackett is standing on his head, somewhat resembling a Hindu God with hockey gear on each arm.  I cannot emphasize how SO in the bag I thought this was.  Only my sister knew the true secret of my elation (as my parents did not approve of my underage gambling).  I go up to use the bathroom.  A couple minutes in, I hear what sounds like my folks cheering.  Meh, Calgary probably tied it up, no worries.

Just when I’m finishing up, the doorbell rings.  It’s my buddy Lewis.  I finish telling him how great everything’s going to be tomorrow, gonna have a grand old time, bla bla bla.  High fives are flying around.  We go downstairs to watch the game, the siren is going again.  Bah, no worries.  Calgary’s at home, they’ve got a lead, time to turtle, probably finish 3-1 or 4-2 with an empty netter in there.

I sit down on the couch, flush with confidence like Grand Moff Tarkin.  No, in my moment of triumph, I was not going to underestimate my chances!

I lean back, turn towards the TV, and they flash the score:

8-1 Calgary, midway through the second.

Apparently, I feel out of the chair so deflated that my parents thought something was wrong.  All I really remember is my sister laughing.. and laughing.. and laughing.

And Lewis laughing.. and laughing.. and laughing..

Yep, Calgary picked now to run up the score.  Jeff Hackett had long since been exorcised from the net, some clown took his place.  May as well have just played with six skaters for all the good it did.  Final score, 10-3.

The next day at school, for all the people who came up and consoled me, you’d have thought a relative died.  And don’t get me wrong, I got my chance to atone.  In back-to-back Jets games last year, I won more than said $1,600 would have been.  And I had sold shares in my ticket to ensure a small profit at the time.

I guess, in the final analysis, it was worthwhile.  I got my first “gambling epic fail” story.  It’s like your first kill, your first dollar earned.  It was the loss of innocence for me that really meant something.

So no, I don’t know if I was up until January 7th 1991, but 100% sure that on January 8th 1992, I had officially become a gambler.

Day #3 – Favorite gambling quotes

Some of my favorite gambling quotes.  Yes, yes, I know, you could just google up “gambling quotes” if you wanted to see other people writing about gambling.  This selection, I believe, nicely highlights what gambling means to me.

Dice have their laws, which the courts of justice cannot undo. – St. Ambrose

I’ve often thought, if I got really hungry for a good milk shake, how much would I pay for one? People will pay a hundred dollars for a bottle of wine; to me that’s not worth it. But I’m not going to say it is foolish or wrong to spend that kind of money, if that’s what you want. So if a guy wants to bet twenty or thirty thousand dollars in a poker game that is his privilege. – Jack Binion

Every conscious act requires risk. Every conscious act requires decision. Put these two facts together and you realize that the secret to life is not to avoid gambling but to gamble well. – Mike Caro

I believe in luck. How else can you explain the success of those you dislike? – Jean Cocteau

Gamblers bet on possibilities. Pros bet on probabilities. – Bob Dancer

Dear God, please let me break even today; I need the money! – The Gambler’s Prayer

A lottery is a salutary instrument and a tax laid on the willing only, that is to say, on those who can risk the price of a ticket without sensible injury, for the possibility of a higher prize. – Thomas Jefferson

When I played pool I was like a good psychiatrist. I cured ’em of all their daydreams and delusions. – Minnesota Fats

Gambling is the future on the internet. You can only look at so many dirty pictures. – Simon Noble

Gambling:
it is not as destructive as war, or as boring as pornography,
it is not as immoral as business, or as suicidal as watching television,
and the percentages are better than religion. – Mario Puzo

There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. The upper class knows very little about it. Now and then you find ambassadors who have sort of a general knowledge of the game, but the ignorance of the people is fearful. Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a “flush.” It is enough to make one ashamed of one’s species. – Mark Twain

He had the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces. – also Mark Twain

One should always play fair when one has the winning cards. – Oscar Wilde

Day #2 – Behold the glory of “King-Sized Mattress”

Today is going to introduce a new kind of post: sharing some of the great home games from the little poker collective back in Calgary.  We only used to play boring casino-standard games, which was okay for my friends that didn’t get out to casinos much, but having spent many a moon playing these games in the casino, I wanted a little variety.  Accordingly, I picked up a little book from the nearest bookstore with ideas for home poker games, and along with ones I vaguely remember playing in the past, and the fine tradition of exploring awesome poker games took off.  And even though I’m in Winnipeg now, every time I visit and I hear about the latest strange mutations and creations, it warms the cockles of my heart (“Or maybe the sub-cockle area…” – Denis Leary).

In addition to just teaching you the game and giving you some basic tech, I’m also going to rate the games in a few fundamental ways, so that you can get a flavor of the game at a glance.  The categories are:

“Power Level” — how big a hand you need to win a pot, in general.  For normalization purposes, we will assume Fixed Limit Texas Hold’em as a 5/10.

“Sanity Level” — just how comfortable would I feel playing this game for serious money?

“Action Level” — Does the money fly in fast and furious, or is it a small-pot game revolved around dominating the antes and blinds?

And, since is the first house game I am posting, I will make it the one I currently consider to be the best: “King Sized Mattress”

Rules:

• Each person antes one unit to start the hand.
• Each player is dealt five hole cards, and nine face-down cards are dealt in the middle of the table, in a 3 x 3 pattern.
• A betting round takes place, starting at the dealer’s left, with bets in multiples of one unit.
• After the betting round, the four corner cards are revealed.
• Another betting round, one unit multiples.
• After the betting round, the four edge cards are revealed.
• Another betting round, but now with two unit multiples.
• Finally, the center card is revealed, and a final betting round takes place, again with two unit multiples.
• Each player remaining then reveals their hole cards, and makes the best hand possible using exactly two of their five hole cards and the three cards in one of the straight lines on board (i.e. three in a row across, downwards, or diagonally).

Half of the pot is awarded to the player who makes the highest hand in this fashion, with the other half going to whoever has the best five-card poker hand in their hole cards.

Some of you might recognize this as “Mattress”, which (as taught to me) was really more like Omaha Hi/Lo split; you had four cards, used exactly two in your hand, and the lowest hand (eight or better to qualify) got half the pot.  The additions to make it “King Sized” were eponymously added by one Karl King during his declaration as dealer, and I don’t think a regular round of Mattress has been played since.

Ratings:

• Power Level: 7/10 — it’s close to, but not quite, up there with Omaha High; you only get eight cards instead of nine to pick five cards from, and despite there being nine board cards, there are only eight possible sets of three you can take, versus the ten possible sets of three you can take from the five cards on a Texas Hold’em board.
• Sanity Level: 9/10 — it’s straightforward, your hand’s potential is realized in a very smooth manner consistent with the betting patterns, and while the disparity between the two half-pot objectives is a bit jarring, it does allow for some excitement when someone playing the hole-card half wakes up to a very rude surprise.  Knowing your opponent helps tons in determining which half of the pot they have been coveting.
• Action Level: 4/10 — Like Chicago or other games where you can be assured of an iron lock (or near lock; see above) for half the pot right off the bat, early round action is stifled by a desire not to chase out customers who will be chasing the other half of the pot and donating to yours.  The use of antes here does mitigate that a lot, and the revelation of the corners generally picks things right back up.

General notes:

• In an homage to the most modern rendition of Hollywood Squares, the middle card is generally referred to as “Whoopi” (as in, Whoopi Goldberg, the resident center square).  Accordingly, hoping for a brick in the middle so that your made hand holds up commonly gets a refrain of “I’ll take Whoopi to block”, with the obvious “taking Whoopi to win!” for those still fishing.
• I’ll have some exact numbers in a later update, but as alluded to above, occasionally you can have a very strong hand for the hole-card half get beaten by an even stronger one.  When you consider that not all strong hole-card hands are necessarily good for the other half of the games (i.e. two small gappy pair, low trips, low straights, small gappy flushes), three-way pots can often be massive and end with one of the two people doing the whipsawing on the “chump” in the middle actually leaving with nothing.  Hilarity ensues.

… finally, I make one request.  If any of the games I’ve introduced to anyone get played as a new introduction to your house games, drop me a line; I’d love to know how far and wide games like this spread.

Thanks for reading, see you all tomorrow!