Control

I don't like whining about bad beats and most people don't like reading about them. Bad beats are a part of the game that you have to live with. That's where it gets tricky. Pile a couple on top of each other and it can be difficult to maintain emotional control.

There's no question that I'd been running good for about two months before this week. I had luckboxed a couple of slim draws and seemed to win all the right flips. When the flip was for a $50 pot, I lost; a $500 pot, I won. Then this week it was like the universe decided to pay back two months worth of missing run-bad.

It started with a couple of just generally blah sessions where I couldn't get much going. I also got 3-outed for the biggest pot I played in those two sessions. Still, the losses were mild and I was able to shrug them off.

Yesterday I put in one of my longest sessions this year because the games at Mandalay were quite good. So of course this was the session where I was epically dead. I had long stretches (hours) without winning a single pot while watching people around me make atrocious plays and give away chips. For me it was either a case of unplayable hands or board kryptonite. I did not make a single set, straight or flush in almost 10 hours. Not even sure I flopped any draws to them. Every big pair was either cracked or got no action.

That left me with the one-pair and two-pair type hands (when I actually made some) which my opponents had no problem running down more often than not. And given the station tendencies of my opponents, there were few good spots for bluffing. At one of the best tables I'd seen in several weeks, I wound up down two buy-ins because I literally couldn't buy a pot.

Obviously two buy-ins isn't the end of the world. It's just frustrating, coming at a good table and on the heels of some crap sessions. That's where it becomes difficult to maintain emotional control. I probably played one hand quite badly towards the end of the session due to frustration and it cost me some money.

I've been playing a lot lately because I've had the time. Yet given the state of how things have gone lately I think I probably need to pull it back a bit. It's too bad, because the games in the next week should be excellent. But a little break to shake off a nasty, lingering funk is sometimes the best solution.

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isildur1 Highlights Online Poker's Growing Pains

I've been meaning to write about table image; I also wanted to say a few words about putting a guy on tilt at Venetian the other night. But given the timeliness of the topic... a few words on isildur1.

Today Change100 posted an op-ed on PokerNews under the headline "Hand History Analysis Has and Always Will Be Part of Poker". Her op-ed refers to the collusion and cheating allegations now being leveled against CardRunners team member and Full Tilt Red Pros Brian Townsend, Brian Hastings and Cole South for pooling a database of 50,000 hands they had individually played against isildur1 and then mutually dissecting those hands to look for patterns as to how the Swede plays certain spots.

Change100's premise is that, "all [Townsend, Hastings and South] really did was use their brains and engage in the same hand-sharing rituals that have gone on since the days of Wild Bill Hickok. Their little saloon chat just had the benefit of technology." She believes that because the technology exists to pool all of these individual hands into a database and then rigorously analyze them, then woe to those who don't use it. What the CardRunners pros did was fine, she says. However that analysis punts on the more difficult question of whether what the CardRunners pros did was illicit, never mind unethical, especially in light of a recent FTP software update that prevents players from importing hands into tracking databases unless they personally participated in the hands.

In many sporting events (and hey, even in poker these days), players and teams look at "game film" of their opponents. How did the opponent play in a previous match in certain situations? They look for tendencies so that they can be best-prepared for their own match against that opponent. The Dallas Cowboys look at film of a game between the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles to try to find exploitable flaws in certain of the Giants' defensive schemes.

What the CR pros did was more akin to the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Redskins combining their analysis of the game film between the Giants and the Eagles. In the NFL, this would never happen for a variety of reasons: it's anti-competitive -- by helping each other, the Cowboys and the Redskins may be hurting themeselves; doing so may be in violation of league guidelines; and having the benefit of a combined analysis would be deemed by many to be an "unfair" advantage for each team. All of this despite the fact that the technology allows for such an analysis to take place.

In the nosebleed poker games on FTP, Townsend is the Cowboys, Hastings is the Redskins, isildur1 is the Giants and Full Tilt Poker is the NFL. Tilt has issued guidelines (its Terms of Service) which prohibit data-mining and the sharing of hand histories. Townsend and Hastings violated those guidelines.

Nobody's saying that the coaches of the Cowboys and the Redskins might not discuss some things over dinner, the way "Doyle Brunson and Puggy Pearson chatt[ed] over a buffet on Fremont Street in 1976." But the combined rigorous analysis, using inside information that each team has gleaned in its own dealings with the Giants, would never fly.

This brings us back to the question of "if the technology exists, why not use it." The most obvious answer is because it creates an arms race where it is much more difficult to be long-term successful without taking advantage of all of the "add-on's" available: the HUDs and the databases and the training sites and the what-have-you's. This, in turn, makes the games less fishy because it discourages new players from sticking around after their initial deposit has evaporated

Change100 ends her op-ed by positing that "those who can’t fathom going to the trouble of such an extensive level of analysis of an opponent are attacking Hastings and Townsend". That's selling the opposing viewpoint far too short. I was one of the biggest proponents of data-mining back in 2004 when it first became possible to do. Yet I now see how bad it is for the game. And I'm not the only one.

At the beginning of this year Nat Arem, founder of ThePokerDB, was asked by PokerNews "what one thing that could be attributed to poker's "boom" would you prevent or change?" His response is telling and damning at the same time:

...this is going to sound bad because it is an industry that I helped to develop, but I wish that all of the things that made the poker world less fishy would've never developed. That would include things like datamining stuff, like what we do at the PokerDB or all those other things. It would also include CardRunners. It would include StoxPoker. It would include things like rakeback... The reason why is because it turns poker into this business that essentially exists entirely for the good players to extract money as quickly as possible from the bad players.

The simplest solution to all of these issues is one proposed by Paul Nobles on Pokerati: allow players to change their screen names once a week. Convert their existing screen name to a "login" and then give them the option to play under a different screen name that can be changed once a week. When that happens, the illicitness and ethicality of data-mining and sharing hand history databases becomes moot.

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ARIA Report

Last night CK and I made our first trip to ARIA, the casino that opened at CityCenter last week. Our dominant thought after a night of poker and wandering around the casino was, "Who is this casino intended for?"

Everything in the casino feels like it's trying a little too hard. CK asked me, "Does every fucking thing in here have to be a design element?" Of course not -- functional elements can remain purely functional and few people would care. But that's not the way the project has been conceived and implemented. In ARIA, even the toilet stall doors in the men's room are a design element.

When you look at the history of the CityCenter project that shouldn't be surprising. CityCenter (and by extension ARIA) was first conceived in 2004. 2004, if you remember, was the year in which the U.S. economy was soaring towards frenzied and excessive heights on the basis of free and easy credit. Ground-breaking for CityCenter took place in June 2006, still slightly ahead of the first cracks in the economy.

In many ways CityCenter is a monument to the excesses of the decade -- the "spend today what you'll earn tomorrow" mentality. To CK and me it felt like ARIA -- and perhaps CityCenter as a whole -- is intended for people who are going to spend, spend, spend without a care in the world. How else do you explain spending $30 for a cheeseburger and a beer at the casino "cafe"? How else do you explain all of the "design elements" everywhere you go? How else do you explain the no-expense-spared feel of everything in the casino?

The problem is that the U.S. pscyhe has moved past that unlimited-spending mentality after the economic shocks of the last eighteen months. People are living within their means again. The new fiscal prudence and sobriety suggests that the pool of people that CityCenter and ARIA were designed for is now much, much smaller than when the project was first conceived.

That's not to say ARIA's not a nice place. The poker room is right by the door that leads into the casino from the valet and the self-park. Last night the room was packed with games ranging from 3-6 LHE to 9-18 Omaha Hi/Lo to 4-8 mix to 5-10 NLHE and the level of the opponents (in the 1-3 NLHE at least) was about what you'd expect to find at Venetian or Bellagio.

Yet as VegasRex recently worried, ARIA is just a vagina. It serves a purpose but it could just as easily serve that purpose without the lightning-bolt pubic hair design and the glitter that dusts its edges. When you get down to it, who cares about lightning bolts and glitter?

The world will be watching to see how ARIA fares once the fanfare surrounding its opening has faded into the ether. Things could easily go either way. As for poker, right now the action in the room is great but not any different than a place like Venetian.

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You Just Don't Have the Stake

Let's be frank here. You never wanted my friendship. And you feared to be in my debt. So you didn't need a friend like me. Now you come and say "Don Corleone, give me justice."

Yesterday I had a conversation with a good friend about whether or not he should enter into a staking arrangement so that he could grind online MTTs. His backer would put up 100% of the bankroll, and they'd share the profits 50-50. The kicker (as with most staking arrangements) is that the profits would be subject to "make-up".

Make-up is not quite as bad as buying securities on margin -- there's no interest on the money loaned to buy the securities, or in this case the money loaned as the initial bankroll -- but the effect is similar. The potential upside of any gain to the borrower is minimized, and the potential downside is magnified, because no matter what happens the "borrowed money" has to be paid back.

Consider an example: I am backed by CK 100%. I start out with a 10k bankroll and lose 5k of it on an extended downswing. Then I have a nice score, maybe a 15k score. I don't get to keep 7.5k of that score. First I have to "make up" my earlier losses -- by paying back 5k to CK. Only after those losses are settled do I get to keep half of the remainder, which turns out in this instance to be 5k. So instead of being up 7.5k (or 10k if I staked myself) I'm only up 5k. And this assumes a "big score". After that first downswing, I might spend a long time grinding out small and medium wins just to get out of make-up. At that point I would be playing 100% for my backer and 0% for myself.

My take on staking has always been: if you're good enough to show a long-term positive result, then stake yourself. Otherwise you're admitting to a bankroll management issue (i.e. playing above what your bankroll can support). But I'm not going to get into it much further because CK has written an excellent post that has generated some great comments about why the typical 50-50 make-up staking deal is such a bad arrangement for the player. Go read it.

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WPBT 2009

For me the most interesting part of WPBT weekend is finding out what others were up to when they weren't with me. The WPBT is this giant amoeba -- a pseudopod of people shoots out over here to go to a $300 dinner, and maybe another one shoots out over there to play a round of 40-degree golf. Those pods are still connected to the whole and one way or another the whole will eventually catch up with them. But for a few minutes or a few hours the pods are out on their own, doing whatever it is that amoeba pseudopods do. (If this weekend is any indication, it involves the absorption of alcohol.)

We had Twitter to stay in touch with the rest of the amoeba this year, to remotely spy on the proceedings. That's how I first learned about Table 16. Otis called out his own bad luck; "I have thrown a lot of parties in my life, but few as big as the one I am throwing at MGM table 16". By the time I got there my crack chip-counting skills eyeballed more than $5,000 on the $200-max-buy table. Yikes.

But I still enjoy the trip reports more than anything else. They give a depth to the proceedings that 140 characters don't allow and they let me see Vegas in a way I can't anymore: through the eyes of someone just visiting. Sure, CK and I stayed on the Strip this year to cut down on the possibility of any Layne Flack-like encounters with the LVMPD. But it's different when you live here; doubly so when about 100 like-minded souls aren't in town hellbent on leaving their mark with a 4-day bender.

Please keep those reports coming. I may lurk most of the time but I'm reading as much as I can. I want to find out what the rest of the amoeba was up to while I was needling Iggy, talking journalism with Gnome and Peaker, freezing with Pebbles on the golf course, watching the Stevie Wonder dealer-tainer play air keyboard on the brass rail in the dealer-tainer pit, or rocking out to Steel Panther with BadBlood.

In that vein, a collection of quotes from the weekend:

* "Not a goddamn chance." --AlCantHang, 5pm Thursday, on likelihood of his attendance at golf the next morning.
* "I dated a girl in high school who looks exactly like JoeSpeaker." --someone from the Steel Panther outing (but I can't remember who).
* "Steel Panther? Is that a strip club?" --Carter
* "How much is this worth to you? I have nothing but time and spite." --the legendary Dawn Summers to Penner, playing 1-2 NLHE at IP.
* "Bet more next time." --Otis to Drizz upon paying off a $20 "last longer" prop bet.

There would have been many more but my phone died some time Friday and didn't get juice again until Sunday afternoon. I'll leave you with a quote from the pre-eminent Shane Nickerson, playing mixed games at the MGM Friday night, that neatly sums up the whole weekend:

"It just got interesting, didn't it assholes."

It certainly did. Thanks for an awesome weekend, WPBT. It was sorely needed.

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Reporting for Duty

"At my signal... unleash hell."

And so it all comes down to this. The advance scouts of the WPBT Armada have already reached Las Vegas. The rest of the legions arrive tomorrow and Friday. The LVMPD has lowered the metro area's DefCon status to 2.

There are no command-and-control functions for our forces. Each soldier is the general of his or her own platoon of one. The only thing that unites us all is a bond forged in words, beaten into shape with Hammers, and tempered by distance and time. And booze. Lots and lots of booze.

There will be degeneracy. There will be chicanery. Iggy will probably offend a cowboy and someone will most definitely fall down. Hopefully no one will wind up in a wheelchair, on a stretcher, under a table or with anything worse than a raging hangover and a great story.

But if they do, we'll be ready to break out the Purple Hearts and the Silver Stars (and maybe break people out of jail). WPBT 2009 starts tomorrow. Trust me on this -- unless your name is AlCantHang, your liver is NOT prepared.

Rev. AlCantHang officiates a roshambo match between Anonymous and StB, Summer 2006.

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Winding Down

We've reached one of the two quiet points of the tournament calendar. Very few tournaments are scheduled from mid-July to mid-August because everyone needs a break after the seven-week insanity of the WSOP. There's a similar gap from the second week of December to the second week of January as everyone enjoys the holidays and the end of another year. Once the New Year has been ushered in, things pick back up with the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure and the Aussie Millions.

This was scheduled down-time for me so while I have my eye on developments in the at-large poker industry, I'm not giving them a ton of my time. Instead I fill my days with as many articles as I can pen and of lots and lots of poker, a luxury I can't afford (and don't usually desire) when on the tournament trail. That means lots of time at the real tables on the Strip, and perhaps even a few online qualifiers for live tournament series like the Aussie Millions or the LAPC.

Between all of this time playing poker, and the large group of friends arriving in town in two days, the end of the year is off on the right foot.

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The Gus Hansen Project

It's cold and raining in Las Vegas, with snow potentially on the way. This had better change before Friday morning's round of WPBT golf. I thought I left "winter golf" behind when I left New York City.

Today I finished some work-related reading, Gus Hansen's Every Hand Revealed. The book, which was published last year, is the hand-by-hand story of Hansen's victory in the 2007 Aussie Millions. During that tournament Hansen kept a voice recorder with him at all times and recorded notes on every hand he played (329 hands over the course of the tournament, out of about 850 dealt). Essentially it's a less-comprehensive Andy Bloch Project with the actual hands played much more "fleshed out" by Hansen.

Given that description, I was inclined to think that it would be an interesting read -- a rare glimpse inside a poker pro's head. I found it to be anything but. You can see how aggression played a huge part in Hansen's victory and how Hansen is more willing to get involved with marginal holdings than most players, but those themes become clear by the end of the second day of play. There are still three days of play remaining at that point, and the remaining pages fail to produce any deep revelations. In fact, the book becomes a bit tedious (though still a quick read) and starts to feel like a post hoc justification of Hansen's decisions. There are a few points where he points out hands that he believes he misplayed, but otherwise the deep insights are lacking..

Four years ago this book might have been "revolutionary". Now, in an age where analysis of no-limit hold'em has become oversaturated, it feels passe. And this is coming from a "math guy", something that Hansen himself acknowledges in the book is a critical skill to grasp as a winning NLHE player.

I know that my good friend Shamus enjoyed this book. He is a fair bit smarter and more eloquent than I am. Perhaps I missed out on something, given that my read of the book was (necessarily) quick. But if given the choice, I think I'd take back those hours and use them for something else -- especially since a highly-condensed version of the 2007 Aussie Millions is available on PokerTube for free.

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One Time

Prepare for a PokerGrump-like post!

Things were kinda dead for a Saturday night at Venetian yesterday. Katkin and Elissa weren't having much luck either. At Elissa's suggestion we motored down the street to Caesar's.

I'm not the biggest fan of the Caesar's poker room. Its isolation makes walk-in traffic unlikely and it feels more like a library reference room than a poker room. Plus it's a Harrah's property, which makes it inherently evil. But since we'll be at Caesars on Saturday for WPBT (and since commenter Keiser mentioned that the bad-beat jackpot promotion was no longer running) a little recon was fine by me.

The bad-beat jackpot was nowhere to be found, replaced by high-hand bonuses.

When I lived in L.A. I regularly would see terrible dealer abuse. It's appalling the way some miserable poker players take their unhappiness out on dealers. As a rule I'm not one to complain about dealers. By and large dealers have a job to do and they do it. Some do it better than others, some do it worse than others. If you get one of the worse ones for a particular down, well, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. After thirty minutes that dealer moves on to his or her next table and that's that.

Last night I had issues with three dealers in two hours. The first dealer was the least offensive of the bunch. His problem was that he spent as much time chatting with a blonde woman in the 1-seat as he did moving along the action. It was cringe-inducing and annoying to listen to (especially since the woman wasn't very bright) but at least it didn't impact the flow of the game too much.

The second dealer was the first one to light my fuse. I flopped a set of sevens on an 8-7-2 two-diamond flop and had to fold the river 8d-7-2d-9-Jd when the blonde woman made a big raise of my small blocking bet. "Look at this," I said with a sigh to Katkin. I opened my hand to the whole right-hand side of the table as I prepared to muck.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" the dealer yelled. He rather sternly admonished me against sharing my hand with Katkin.

"What?" I replied. "I'm obviously folding." And I pitched my cards into the muck. The dealer replied something about not being able to hear what we were saying -- pretty unlikely, since we weren't exactly whispering. But whatever, I could see where it might not have been clear that I was folding. Things would have been fine if they stopped there. Yet about a minute later, the dealer interrupted me after Katkin and I returned to a previous conversation.

"What did you show?" the dealer asked in a strong, imperial tone.

"I'm sorry?" I replied.

"What. Did. You. Show."

This is the point at which I decided that this dealer was not getting any tokes from me for the rest of the down. It turned out that someone at the other end of the table had asked what I had shown. I have no problem with that -- those are the rules. Show one, show all. Since the deck was already in the process of being shuffled, the dealer couldn't pull the cards out. If the dealer had just said to me, "The gentleman in the 8-seat wants to know what you showed," I would have had no issue. I would have happily said "a pair of sevens" and that would have been that.

Instead the dealer felt the misplaced need to exert some sort of authority over the table and it rubbed me the wrong way. I replied to his clipped query with a clipped answer. "A seven of diamonds and a seven of spades."

Fine. We moved on, I later won a $550 pot and the dealer got fuck-all.

The third dealer was named Enrique. Enrique was perfectly competent and things were moving fine until I was dealt QQ under the gun. I raised to $12 and it folded around to Katkin in the big blind. "I'll give you some action," he said as he tossed in calling chips.

I fired once at an A-K-2 flop, then shut down after that. At showdown Katkin showed Ah-6d.

I opened my queens and flicked them with my finger. "You fucking suck," I said with a laugh. "I can't ever beat you." Into the muck my queens went.

That would have been that, but Enrique the dealer jumped into the middle of things by telling me that I wasn't allowed to say "the f-word". I looked at him like he had two heads.

"You're kidding," I said. He replied that he was not, that I should not use the f-word again. So, of course, me being me, I provoked him. "Fuck that," I said. Enrique immediately called a floor over to the table. To tell on me. At 2am on a Saturday night (and no, I was not drinking).

"This gentleman used the f-word," he said, "and then I told him he shouldn't use the f-word."

"He shouldn't," agreed the floor.

"When I told him that, he said 'F that' to me." The floor turned to me and told me not to use "the f-word" for the rest of the night. I tried to explain the context -- that Katkin and I are friends who were just having a laugh -- but he didn't care and repeated his instructions to me. I replied that it didn't matter because I was leaving. By this point I was steamed, having failed for the third dealer down in a row not to be annoyed by the dealer. It doesn't make any sense to keep playing poker at 2am when I'm steamed (not even because of another player!) and being told to stop having fun.

"You don't have to leave," replied the floor. I told him I was leaving anyway because this was the second dealer I'd had an issue with in two hours. The floor decided to cut his losses and suggested that maybe it wasn't the dealers that were the problem. Katkin and I both laughed.

"I've never had a problem with any dealer in any room on the Strip before tonight," I said. I racked up and Katkin racked up as well, having decided that the game wasn't juicy enough to bother staying. These actions ticked off the guy in the 8-seat.

"Why did you have to butt in there?" he asked the dealer. "Nobody had a problem with anything. Now, because of you, $1,000 just walked off the table." He too, grabbed a rack and cashed out. Suddenly the eight-handed game was down to five players with between $100 and $200 each and was likely to break.

To sum up: I decided to take a chance and play in a room I don't normally visit. My reward for that was to have one dealer act like the king of the table (instead of the steward) and another to interrupt the enjoyment of two players who were obviously laughing around and having a good time, to the point that the dealer probably caused the whole table to break.

Well done, Caesars poker room. The way your dealers handle player interactions are unparalleled. Thankfully, after Saturday, I won't ever have to deal with them again.

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Slummin' It Up on Fremont Street

Last night I ventured downtown to the Golden Nugget with Katkin and a needing-to-blow-off-steam CK. We were on a mission in search of cowboys.

The rodeo is in full swing now which means the cowboys are here in Vegas. The problem -- if you're an aficionado of cowboys and/or their money -- is that the cowboys steer clear of my usual haunts like the Venetian. That kind of casino is a bit too upscale for these guys. You're more apt to find them in low-key surroundings like the Imperial Palace, Harrah's or downtown.

The Nugget was Katkin's suggestion and it was a great one. Not only was the place crawling with cowboys, but we also spotted Eskimo Clark playing a slot machine. It seems right to see Eskimo in a downtown casino, even if it is the nicest one there.

The poker... eh, not much to say there. I got donk-lucky against a Crazian (who knew he would actually have a set there?) and otherwise enjoyed watching people sit down and buy in for $1,000. At one point our little $1-$2 game had more than $5,000 on the table. Ah, the beauty(?) of the uncapped buy-in game.

CK and I ended the night with her at a video poker machine and me sweating the action while eavesdropping as a drunk cowboy flirted with a hooker. The cowboy eventually got the drift of what the hooker's profession was, but it was pure comedy listening to him chat her up before he figured it out. What finally clued him in was when he asked what her occupation was. She replied, "Pleasure provider".

I thought she might have gone with the classier "relaxation therapist" but we *were* downtown, after all.

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What It Means to Be Champion

Again, thanks to everyone who offered up question suggestions for my interview last night with WSOP champion Joe Cada. Cada and I spoke for about 25 minutes. It was clear to me that Cada has become fairly comfortable handling interviews a month after his victory. Compare that to his appearance on Letterman, where he seemed slightly off balance. (Cada mentioned to me that if he could, he would go back and do the Letterman interview again and re-phrase some of his answers to Letterman's questions.)

What would have happened had Darvin Moon won the Main Event? Rightly or wrongly, in recent years the winner of the Main Event has been anointed as an ambassador of the game. If you want to be cynical about it, you can say that this role is a result of the influence (and money) of the online poker sites. They have a vested interest in making sure the game continues to grow and therefore lock up the winner under a sponsorship agreement. Then, in Moon's words, the winner becomes their "bitch". In Cada's case, he willingly signed a sponsorship and marketing agreement with PokerStars and he seems eager to embrace his role as a good-will ambassador for the game.

Would Moon have stayed away from the extra money and the extra opportunity? And if he did, would anyone rightly have been able to excoriate him for it?

This past summer, there was a small flap when Richard Austin, the winner of WSOP Event #35 - $5,000 Pot-Limit Omaha, refused all media requests after his victory. He even went so far as to tell WSOP officials that he had no interest in taking part in the "bracelet ceremony" scheduled for the next day and demanded that he be presented with his bracelet immediately following the conclusion of the tournament. WSOP Media Director Nolan Dalla, normally the coolest of cool cats, was apoplectic at Austin's temerity.

But let's be honest -- as former New York Jets head coach Herm Edwards once (in)famously said, "You play to win the game!" In poker, the prize for winning is the lion's share of the cash. A win doesn't obligate the winner to stand on a pedestal for any outside entity's marketing machine (which is what most of those "media" requests and the bracelet ceremony are all about).

We also have to be honest that there's an ancillary benefit for us, as poker players, when an online site like PokerStars offers Cada a bundle of cash to act as a figure-head of poker for a year. It draws players into the game. New players are never bad.

So while I don't believe that winning the Main Event obligated Cada (or anyone else) to act as a poker ambassador, I'm glad that they chose to do so. And if last night's interview with Cada is any indication, he should be a much better ambassador than the last, who never seemed comfortable under the intense spotlight of the poker world.

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Call for Questions

It's exactly one week until the first of the bloggers arrive for the Sixth Annual WPBT Weekend. Things have been moving quickly for me for much of the last week and I don't expect that to change over the next week. When Thursday next comes, as Wayne and Garth once said, it will be "Party time. Excellent."

Tonight I have the opportunity for a phone interview with the latest WSOP Main Event Champion, Joe Cada. I solicited some question ideas yesterday via Twitter (thanks to everyone who replied). Given that I witnessed most of the final table, I've been toying with a more final-table-angled piece. I still haven't decided, which likely means that the interview will be, um, "wide-ranging" -- especially since the finished product will appear in a magazine in Australia, where the Champ hasn't received much exposure yet.

But! If there's anything special you'd like me to ask Cada, leave a comment. I'm interviewing him at 6:30pm Pacific Time tonight, which gives you about seven hours to get your questions in and gives me about seven hours to organize my notes into something coherent.

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You Make the Call -- the Results Show

Yesterday I posted two hands from live 1-2 NLHE at the Venetian where the Hero (Yours Truly) found himself in a sticky situation. To refresh:

Hand No. 1

Villian is a tight regular from the now mostly defunct Mirage 10-20 FLHE game. He is sitting 1-2 NLHE while he waits for a seat at 8-16 FLHE. We both have about $400; nobody else has more than $200. He raises two limpers to $15. I have the button and AsKc. I call; both limpers calls for a $60 pot. The flop comes down K-8-2, three suits. Checks to Villain who bets $50. Action is now on me.

Hand No. 2

Villian has been at the table 30-45 minutes. Seems to know what he's doing but hasn't opened for a raise yet. He has about $220, nobody else at the table has more than $150 except me (about $400). Villian raises one limper to $15. I have the button and TsTc. I call; limper calls also for a $45 pot. The flop comes down 9c-4c-4s. Checks to Villain who bets $40. Action is now on me.

The question was, given each the hand has been played to this point, what should I do? I specifically instructed commenters to avoid discussion of pre-flop play, though I note that a few couldn't resist. I'll therefore address that later. But first the flop actions.

For Hand No. 1, only 4 of the 14 commenters who suggested an action said they would raise. The other 10 were in favor of calling. Looking back on it, I am in favor of calling as well. The reasons why: (1) this particular Villain's PFR raise is narrow and he is a very straightforward player; (2) the board has no draw on it; (3) most live 1-2 NLHE players at the Venetian, as bad as they are, won't chase a naked eight for $50, rightly or wrongly; and (4) I have position. With no draws on the board, calling behind the PFR is likely to slow him down unless he has AK/KK/AA. This Villain would only fire again on the turn with one of those three hands (*perhaps* KQ, but I'm not sure if it's in his PFR range at a NLHE table). If he fires again, I can fold with the realization that sometimes I am folding to AK. If he checks, I can fire with impunity.

As played, I raised to $120. Remember, we're both about $400 deep. Both limpers folded, and then Villain re-raised to something stupid ($200? $250? whatever). I said to him, "Respect", flashed my AK and mucked. He responded, "That seems reasonable," and showed AA.

The responses to Hand No. 2 were a bit more uniform. 11 people said raise, 1 said call, 1 said "raise or fold" depending on the read, and Waffles punted on giving any answer at all (well played, Waffles). To be honest, I'm still not sure about this one. The problem with calling is that too many cards are potential scare cards on the turn -- if any A, K, Q or J comes, what do I do? Calling also makes it look like I'm drawing clubs, inducing Villian to ship all non-club turn cards whether he's ahead or not. I suppose if a club hits I can represent it but then I'm just turning my hand into a bluff.

On the other hand, TT is essentially top pair -- just barely above the board, but behind any pair Villian is likely to hold. It's also unlikely Villian is holding a nine or a four. Am I really prepared to go to the felt with just top pair here for 100 BBs?

As played, I raised to $100. He shipped for $200. I agonized about the decision but folded, theorizing that given Villlain's tight play to that point he was unlikely to ship $200 with a draw like AcKc. More likely I was behind a big pair.

AS FOR PRE-FLOP: at least three people said I should three-bet pre-flop. Sometimes I do. But one of the things that CK has repeatedly drilled into my head about Vegas 1-2, and that I have found to be true, is this: the vast majority of players are terrible and play very straightforward poker -- but they'll also call lots of pre-flop raises. [Case in point: CK related a story the other day of being so card-dead for hours that she was sure her image was that of a rock, but her re-raise to $30 with AA still got 2 callers!]

Given that I've found this statement to be true, I will sometimes play hands a little more slowly pre-flop. Doing so allows me to retain some control over the size of the pot and also requires my opponents to make more post-flop decisions -- a place where I feel my skill edge over them is even bigger than it is pre-flop. It may be the +EV play to 3-bet TT on the button pre-flop, but when both opponents call my hand is going to be just as tricky to play with a pot now wildly out of control.

Remember, these games don't play like games do online. Online, I'd probably three-bet both hands (esp. with the button) almost all of the time. Live, sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. The downside risk of not three-betting preflop is that once in a while -- or twice in a week -- I'll find myself venturing out into No Man's Land and will have to make some tough decisions.

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You Make the Call

Two nights last week, I encountered situations where I felt a bit "stuck" as to what to do with a hand. Since I know Chilly loves it when I post hands that I mis-played, consider these two very similar scenarios:

Hand No. 1

Villian is a tight regular from the now mostly defunct Mirage 10-20 FLHE game. He is sitting 1-2 NLHE while he waits for a seat at 8-16 FLHE. We both have about $400; nobody else has more than $200. He raises two limpers to $15. I have the button and AsKc. I call; both limpers calls for a $60 pot. The flop comes down K-8-2, three suits. Checks to Villain who bets $50. Action is now on me.

Hand No. 2

Villian has been at the table 30-45 minutes. Seems to know what he's doing but hasn't opened for a raise yet. He has about $220, nobody else at the table has more than $150 except me (about $400). Villian raises one limper to $15. I have the button and TsTc. I call; limper calls also for a $45 pot. The flop comes down 9c-4c-4s. Checks to Villain who bets $40. Action is now on me.

For both hands, the question is: given how I have played the hand to this point, what should I do now? I'm not interested in any discussion of my pre-flop action. I know a case can be made for re-raising pre-flop but in both of these instances I chose to call. Having done that, what is the best response to Villain's flop bet?

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