The WSOP Main Event Is Going on Right Now . . .
OK, I'm caught up in the WSOP excitiement and you should be too. As cheaply thrilling as it was, my evening of $2/$4 at Foxwoods just can't compete for your attention. I'll write it up next weekend. Til then, go to Final Table Poker, the Gutshot Poker Collective, or even just RGP and experience envy.
posted by James Torr at 7:31 PM

WPT All-In Texas Hold'Em
I was browsing RGP today, which I haven't really done much since I discovered poker blogs. I came across this amusing link: http://www.sycuancasino.com/wpt.html. Seems the Sycuan Indian casino, outside San Diego, is offering a new table game called World Poker Tour All-In Texas Hold'Em. This link describes the optimum strategy for this non-poker game. The house edge with perfect play is 1.5%. Should be interesting to see how far this game spreads.

I had a very busy weekend and I am behind in reading blogs, so for all I know this may have been posted elsewhere. I didn't play online at all this weekend, but B and I did play at Foxwoods Friday night, and that'll be the subject of my next post. For now, I'm going to try and get some work done . . .
posted by James Torr at 1:13 PM

Embarassing Moment at the Micro-Limits
OK, so after the WPBT III this past Sunday, I decided I was sick of Pacific's lousy software, so I cashed out. Problem is their cashouts take a few days, and unfortunately I had all my bankroll tied up with them. So last night I insta-cashed $50 into Paradise, because Paradise covers insta-cash fees. Boy is that a great feature. Coupled with their software, which I feel is the best out there, I enjoy playing there despite the tougher opposition.

Right now I'm up $23 at the .50/$1 Hold'Em tables. Last night, however, I had a few beers with dinner (nice weather so we grilled), enough that after playing a bit of .50/$1, and winning a bit, I realized I was just a bit too inebriated to really focus. (Failing to make that realization has cost me significant $$ in the past.)

Nothing on TV, though, so I checked out the .02/.04 tables at Paradise. I enjoy 7-Stud Hi-Lo in home games, but have never played it in a casino. Why not a little practice at .02/.04?

So I sit down. I end up making a full house on like the 3rd hand, beating out a flush for the whole pot. A few hands later I'm going low and end up making the straight for the scoop. Same thing happens again a few hands later. Now I'm up over $1.

Then I get a really solid low, and my opponent is obviously going high. We show down and he's awared the whole pot with just two pair and no low. What's going on?

I'm not playing a Hi-Lo game, of course. This is regular 7-Stud. Whoooooooops! I had clicked the wrong game in the lobby. That's not so bad, but to not realize it for so long, and to win not realizing it, well, that's bad. I don't think the poker gods were smiling on a drunken fool so much as they were playing a cruel joke on my opponents. My apologies and sympathies go out to them. If they had wanted to play with seemingly insane opponents, they would've gone to Party Poker!

Turns out Paradise doesn't offer .02/.04 for Hi-Lo, nor for any game besides Hold'Em and 7-Stud. That's a shame, cause I'd like to play some of the games in their "miscellaneous" section for micro-limits, particularly Pineapple.

I played 7-Stud for the rest of the evening and cashed out exactly even. Ouch, I had better results when I was playing the wrong game . . .

Now I face a tough decision. Try and keep up the winning ways at Paradise .50/$1 Hold'Em, or take my money over to Party to take advantage of their latest reload bonus? It's hard to turn down a bonus whoring opportunity, but I'm really in a groove at Paradise and Party requires such a shift in playing style. Something to ponder.
posted by James Torr at 12:09 PM

VVPQotW: Poker Stars Caribbean Cruise
It was an unusual WPT tonight, in that 3 of the players at the final table went out extremely quickly, leaving us the viewers to watch 3-handed action for more than an hour. Fortunately we had Gus Hansen's unpredictable play to keep things exciting.

Just a few comments on tonights's episode:

--I'd never heard a pair of 4s referred to as "the midlife crisis" before.

--Was this the debut of the "WPT Critical Replay," or had I just not noticed it before? Because there's really not enough slow-motion in TV poker coverage.

--Shanna Hiatt had a segment on "what's your favorite hand to play?," and no one mentioned the Hammer?!

And now on to the Vince Van Patten Quote of the Week.

Vince had several quotable lines tonight, and I faced my toughest decision yet on which quote to pick. However, Vince's funniest lines tonight all seemed very scripted (and a couple of them, while somewhat amusing, were distastefully mocking of Hoyt Corkin's southern background), so in the end I decided to go with one that I thought was both spontaneous and really very descriptive of Gus Hansen's play. When Gus Hansen looked down at 73o for the final hand of the night, VVP quipped

He's got a creepy little hand. That's a Gus hand.

Click here for last week's VVPQotW.
posted by James Torr at 11:29 PM

A Low-Rollin' Saturday Home Game
Well, I'm a few days late in posting about the home game I hosted this past Saturday. I had only played with this group of guys once before, about 3 months ago. The previous session had been one big NL Hold'Em tourney, 15 guys with a $20 buy-in, and I had taken second for $100. That evening stands out as by my biggest single-session win (by far) in a live game. Since my usual poker group often does $2 and $3 buy-in tourneys, these other guys (mostly board gamers up around Boston) struck me as significantly more high-rollin'.

To my surprise (and slight disappointment), this past Saturday's home game was a much more low-rollin', "social poker" affair. First off, there were only 6 of us, and 3 of the guys had not been at the previous, more serious tournament. Everyone bought in for $25, but somehow the agreed-upon limits ended up being .25/.50 rather than .50/$1. Once that decision was made I knew the games were going to be very loose, and I grabbed a beer :)

We played dealer's choice for the first 2.5 hours. All manner of crazy wild games were called, making it mostly a gambling type of evening. On the upside, I finally learned 3-5-7, a wild-card game I've heard mentioned frequently in conjunction with home games, but never played myself. (We played the home wild-card version, not the casino game.) It reminded me of Guts but with more information. I called a lot of Anaconda/Pass the Trash and 7-Stud Hi/Lo Roll Your Own. I finished up $3. Woo-hoo!

Then we switched to a NL Hold'Em tournament, $10 buy-in. We paid the first 3 places, which I thought was pretty silly with 6 players, but we were all having fun so I didn't want to make it an issue. We also went with 30 minute blinds, which was great. Previously I'd used 20 minute blinds, since that is what they use at Foxwoods for the multis I have played there, but without a dedicated dealer, 20 minutes is barely enough for an orbit if there are 7 or more people. With 6 people and 30 minutes blinds, the pace was a lot less hectic.

Now, these guys are all very smart guys. I've played board games with a couple of them at different events and gotten stomped. I'm sure that any of them could become very good at poker. But for now, none of them has much experience actually playing poker. A couple of them had read Super/System and were discussing strategy. But none of them play online, and they just haven't had the practice of seeing flops. More importantly, I think they've only ever played in a few home-game tournaments and don't have any feel at all for when or how much to raise. And we were short-handed, but I think they were looking for the kinds of starting hands you'd want in a full game.

Without wanting to sound cocky, I have to say that playing with guys that inexperienced will make you feel like Johnny Moss. None of them wanted to call a big preflop raise, and it was painfully obvious when the flop missed them. I busted out one the guys when he let me limp in with 62o from the BB, and see the turn, and then he called my raise when I made a cheesy straight. After a while I started worrying that I was being too aggressive--but I reminded myself that these guys are all smart and experienced gamers, if not experienced poker players. If this home game becomes a regular thing they're certain to catch on to my tricks before too long.

I ended up finishing 2nd. The downside of the 30 minutes blinds is that when it got down to 2 players we had lots of money in proportion to the blinds. But it was 2 in the morning, and the busted out players were dealing and shuffling for us, so we hurried the ending along. I went all in with QTo and lost to JKo. (I had fun saying, "Oh no, he's Jack-King-off again!" all evening -- which I stole directly from Burt Fu.) That made me the shorter stack. Remarkably, I got KK on the very next hand, pushed in, and lost when he paired his ace.

All in all it was a very fun evening, even if the poker itself was nothing special. And lucky for me I had the WPBT III Sunday night to dispel any notions that I can dominate a real poker tournament :)
posted by James Torr at 3:45 PM

The WPBT III
Congratulations to Otis on winning the World Poker Blogger Tour III last night. He was followed by Mean Gene in 2nd and Boy Genius in 3rd. I finished way down in 17th (out of 30 players).

I'll echo CJ at Up for Poker that the tournament blind structures at Pacific go up way too fast for my taste. I knew this going in, having played a couple Pacific tournaments this week in preparation for the WPBT III. My main goal was not to get short-stacked early and thereby have my options reduced to all-in or fold.

I started out pretty well, raising only the minimum or twice the BB whenever I got a decent hand. Our table seemed the tightest of the 4 hands, and so I went from $800 to about $950 just winning blinds. Then one of the players at my table went alli-in with about $400, I called with QQ, and won. At this point I was very happy.

Then came the turning point. I limped in with 9-10 in LP. and two other players saw the flop. The flop came 998 rainbow. I made a huge mistake and decided to slowplay a little, betting the minimum ($30) on the flop. One player folds, and Chicago Phil calls. The turn is a 5. I bet $60 and Chicago Phil raises to $240. What could the 5 have given him to justify such a raise? If only I had pondered that question a bit longer before re-raising him to $480. He only had $150 after that so he went all-in and I called.

What a horrible move it was to slowplay. But really the slowplay wasn't the worst move. The worst move was that when Chicago Phil raised, all I thought was "A ha, he has fallen for my trap," and not "Oh, crap, why would he do that?" He showed 67 for the straight.

I was down to $400 and was soon moved to another table, where Bad Blood was on my right with over $3,000. He ended up finishing 4th.

With $400 and the rapidly rising blinds, my moves were pretty much fold or all-in, the situation I had really wanted to avoid. A $400 all-in was definitely going to get called. I ended up getting blinded down to $150 and pushing in with 66. A player named logan66 called with 77, and the flop didn't change what the best hand was.

The other lousy thing about the Pacific software is that once busted out, you can't view the chat tournament tables' chat windows. So as I watched the field dwindle further I was deprived of hearing the smack talk that went with it. Also, when two players go all-in at Pacific, cards are not revealed for the race. This made being a railbird at the WPBT III not as fun as I had hoped.

Even so, the final table action was pretty cool. In particular, Mean Gene was the short stack when it got down to the final 4, but it didn't stop him from pushing other players around by pushing his chips in more than anybody else. Though Iggy ended up 6th, he also made good use of the all-in to steal blinds and stay alive til the final table despite not having a huge stack. I think that aggressive style was definitely warranted.

Despite the juicy ring games at Pacific, I think I am going to cash out and play elsewhere for a while. A big consideration is that I want to start accumulating hand histories for PokerTracker, so that I can start examining my play in a more detailed way.

I also hosted another home game Saturday night, which I'l post about later today.
posted by James Torr at 11:25 AM

Brains and Cajones
HDouble's got a beautifully written post up today, titled "Reflections on the Faces of Poker." As the best posts do, it got me thinking. HDouble writes

Unlike the typical 9 to 5 job, poker is a place where intelligence and courage are immediately rewarded. Performance-based pay is rare in the corporate world, and no matter how well you do your job, you're more likely to get a pat on the back rather than a stack of chips.

HDouble's post is about the nature of poker, but it got me thinking about the nature of poker players.

Is it really any wonder that the popularity of poker has exploded in America? You've got literally millions of Americans going to their jobs--whether they're blue collar, white collar, high paying or not--and thinking to themselves "I'm smarter than this." As HDouble says, poker rewards intelligence and courage--with money--in a way that most people's jobs do not. For these people, poker is a way to put their courage and intelligence to the test. A way for people to find out just how far they can go in an arena where only brains and cajones count.

One way of putting it is that poker players tend to have a major "bad-ass" complex. In Neal Stephenson's sci-fi novel Snow Crash, he describes the bad-ass envy that all men feel at some point:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Good players should never allow themselves to be governed by the bad-ass complex, but neither should they pretend it's not there.

To some degree, I feel this way about online poker. When I mention to someone that I play online, and they respond with a mildly shocked look and say something like "Isn't that illegal?" or "You'll lose your shirt," some part of me is thinking, "I definitely have bigger cajones than you." Juvenile? Yes. But true.

And I admit that the idea of a "bad-ass complex" also sounds a bit juvenile. In Big Deal, Anthony Holden describes poker players in far classier terms, with the theme of "bucking the system":

Almost all the poker players I have known, from the hardened pros of Las Vegas to my amateur Tuesday Night brethren in London, have had one specific characteristic in common: They were all people who liked to feel that they had bucked the system. They were determined to live life on their own terms. In a worldly sense, therefore, they were people who had rarely held down a regular job since compelled to by the indigence of youth. If they had since been obliged to do so, or to attempt to do so, they had extricated themselves from it, regardless of the consequences, with all possible speed.

That's the real appeal of Rounders. Mike McDermott is stuck, on the one hand, humping a crappy job (driving a truck), and on the other hand, following the straight and narrow path to success (going to law school). Forget all the stuff with Worm and Teddy KGB--at the end of the movie, when Mike essentially says, "Screw all this, I've got what it takes to succeed in Vegas," he's declaring that he's going to live life on his own terms. However realistic or unrealistic it may be, you can't be a poker player and not envy Mike in some small way at the moment.

That's also the appeal of Las Vegas--you feel like you're bucking the system just by being there. And it's why professional poker players are becoming minor celebrities--they basically symbolize the dream of living life on your own terms. An overly romantic view? Sure.

I'm not saying that poker can give anyone the ability to live life on their own terms, or that the act of playing poker is for some people an act of social rebellion. OK, I guess I've hinted at those two ideas. But what I'm definitely saying is that poker players, as a group, are intelligent, self-confident, individualistic people who are unafraid of seriously testing themselves on a regular basis. In other words, bad-asses :)
posted by James Torr at 3:02 PM

VVPQotW: Aruba
Boy do I love the WPT Aruba event. If you go way back to my second post, you'll see that Aruba was the very first WPT I saw. My wife B and I are parrotheads, and the image of poker in paradise just really pushes my buttons.

Anyhoo, before I get to the Vince Van Patten Quote of the Week (VVPQotW), I have to throw throw out B's quote of the week. We are watching tonight's WPT, and right after Rick Casper's profile/interview, where they discuss how he is going to propose to a women he met a month ago if he does well in the tourney, B offers a synopsis of his remarks:

I met this girl, and her boobs are bigger than my head, so if I win this tournament I'm going to giver her half my money.

Heh heh heh. Seriously though, they did get married, so of course I wish them well.

A couple other notes on tonight's episode:

Did anyone else notice the Pokershootout.com commercial with the midget? The tagline was "Where the little guy can win." Oh my goodness.

Kudos to Erick Lindgren, it seems there's a ton of buzz surrounding him. His line of the night, just after Daniel Larsson had bluffed his 66 out of a pot with Ax: "I'll break you next time." Maybe his nickname should be Drago instead of EDog?

And the VVPQotW is . . .

Put this in your Irish stew, chef, and smoke it.

Click here for last week's VVPQotW
posted by James Torr at 11:22 PM

Who Wants to Bust Out a Supermodel?
I just noticed this promotion on on Paradise Poker:

“Play Caprice” Poker Tournament
A free tournament with over $10,000 in cash and prizes to be won!

Caprice is an international supermodel from Southern California and has become one of the most photographed women in the world, appearing on over 300 magazine covers across the globe. She was voted GQ Magazine's Woman of the Year and Maxim's International Woman of the Year three years running.

Caprice also loves to play poker in her spare time and would love to see you at the tables! You have the opportunity to play Caprice on May 30th, if you place in the top 100 of our nightly qualifiers.

Check this link for more details and, most importantly, a photo of Caprice.

And here's the icing on the cake of this hilarious little gimmick:

Top 10 finishers at final table will receive a personally signed glossy photo of Caprice.
Bonus bounty payment of $500 to the lucky player who knocks Caprice out of the tournament.

The Caprice qualifier tournaments are freerolls. I might have to play in one just because this promotion is so funny. And here I had always thought of Paradise Poker as one of the classier places to play :)
posted by James Torr at 5:59 PM

Poker Tracking
Okay, I've made the decision to buy PokerTracker. I know that's a no-brainer decision for most of you. Jeremy at Love and Casino War posted a couple months ago that "If you intend to be a profitable online poker player, you would be completely insane not to use PokerTracker" and I've read similar advice on many another blog.

Most recently the Royal Poker Blog posted some advice for would-be poker players that you should always be tracking your wins and losses, even if it's not in a database as sophisticated as PokerTracker. Rest assured I have not been lax on that front for the past year and half. I don't go around using the gambler's cliche--"Oh, I mostly break even, sometimes win a little." I've kept an Excel log from Day 1 of my online poker journey. Sure, I occasionally forget to log a .50/$1 session where the results are uninteresting (or too much alcohol was involved, but that's another post), but I am fastidious about logging how much cashola I put in to the online sites vs. how much I take back out.

I had actually downloaded and used PokerTracker last summer, and even filled the database to 1000 hands (the max in the free version). But when it came time to buy, I thought to myself, "I don't know, going through this database feels a little too much like work." That was a "Why am I playing poker?" moment for me. I knew that the best way to improve my game was to track and analyze every bit of information I could, but I also want to keep the focus on having fun, and I worried that always using PokerTracker might take away from that. (B and I were also saving for our wedding at the time, so I-don't-need-to-buy-this-now frugality was also a big factor in the decision.)

Fast-forward to now. I'm taking my poker more seriously, and, inspired by my fellow bloggers, I'm certain that I can have fun with poker while also making the extra effort to improve my game.

I'm going to keep playing at Pacific Poker for a while tho, even though PokerTracker doesn't support it. Actually, Pacific doesn't even have hand histories--but the passive $1/$2 tables are treating me well.
posted by James Torr at 8:59 PM

Rounders Template
I just logged onto Blogger, something I hardly ever do because I use w.bloggar, and I see that Blogger has changed its look. They've also added 6 new templates and one of them is called "Rounders"! Too funny.
posted by James Torr at 7:49 PM

A Cheap, Thrilling Weekend
I got in quite a bit of poker this weekend, and I've been meaning to blog about it all but I got distracted by 1) playing poker this afternoon, and 2) getting sucked into the Survivor All-Stars finale this evening. That latter is ever-so-slightly poker-related because during the "reunion special," the host at one point compared Survivor to poker. Something about "when you bluff in poker, no one gets angry," but when you lie in Survivor, people get pissed. Yup, it's a stretch.

It was a real hodgepodge of poker for me this weekend. First, the small potatoes. Well, actually they're all small.

Social Poker

Saturday night I played at a home game up in Boston. Strictly "social poker": Me, B, and 3 other couples. We started playing poker together every few months as an alternative to getting together and bar-hopping every few months. It was a blast as usual, but the poker was about as un-competitive as it gets, much more so than the home game we hosted the previous Saturday.

With our college buddies, we used to play nickel ante, max bet 25 cents, dealer's choice with every crazy wild-card game you can think of. And all was well. But then there was a movement toward Hold'Em, for a few reasons. First, Rounders, the WPT, and the WSOP have made Hold'Em so cool. Second, some of the real non-poker players said they enjoyed playing one game all night rather than having the rules change every hand as in dealer's choice. Along with the move to Hold'Em we threw in blinds rather than antes, and structured betting, since we had mostly bet the max anyway. The problem is that me, B, and my buddy "Odog" play Hold'Em online and we had a significant advantage over the casual players.

So for a while now our compromise has been to play H.O.S.E.--one orbit each of Hold'Em, Omaha Hi-Lo, 7-Stud, and 7-Stud Eight or Better Hi Lo. Last night we changed it to H.O.S.E.D. and threw in a round of dealer's choice.

Well, Omaha Hi-Lo went over like a lead balloon. Everyone found it too confusing, which in retrospect is not surprising. (But it's hard to make cool acronym without the "O"! S.H.E.D.? C'mon, that sucks compared to H.O.S.E.D.)

Not surprisingly, the most fun was had with dealer's choice. The most popular choice among dealers was Anaconda. Boy I had forgotten how much fun that game can be. (Plus it gives us an "A" for the acronym--S.H.A.D.? S.H.A.D.E? Still not as cool as H.O.S.E.D.)

As I said, a blast was had by all, but I had that most wonderful of problems: I couldn't lose for trying. My friends know B and I are very into poker, and I think there's that little worry in the back of their minds that we are just working them over. So throughout the night I remind everyone just how low the stakes we're playing for are. As in, "OK, I raise 10 . . . PENNIES." But the stakes don't matter so much; no one likes losing their stack. So B and I also don't play as well as we could. Mostly I try to play more loosely (although I have problems toning down the aggression--raising is just too much fun).

I actually managed to lose about $4 in the first orbits of Hold'Em and Omaha, but won it all back and more in the two orbits of 7-Stud. Mostly I got lucky cards, but I was also raising with any decent hand, like starting pair or 3 to a flush, just so that it wasn't a call-fest. The interesting thing was that a raise in Stud was actually driving people out, leaving me with fewer people to beat and thus improving my chances of winning. In Hold'Em and Omaha, of course, no one was folding and you actually have to have the best hand to win. But in Stud I was even winning pots uncontested. This should never happen in a .10-.25 game!! I won a whopping $8 on the evening.

Anyway, the point is that that small amount of tension was there: The non-poker players don't want to feel like suckers losing to "the couple who plays online," and B and I did not enjoy playing less than our best. Next time we get together I'm going to push for a move back to more wild-card games, or perhaps even try to get a trivia game or something like that going. I doubt I will be successful though; even "social poker" is a pretty damn fun way to spend an evening (cheap thrills!), and everyone does love Hold'Em . . .

$1 Big Buck on Paradise

I played the $1 4pm tourney on Paradise on Friday and Sunday (today), finishing 252nd out of 655 on Friday and 119th out of 721 today. In Friday's event I played too tight and weak, and pretty much just got blinded down. I had been reading PokerSavvy's series of articles on online tourneys, and then I read Matt's post critiquing the article. Somewhere in thinking about the two points of view I got it in my hand that I have been playing too loosely in tournaments lately. Today I went back to playing more by instinct, and although my finish wasn't all that much better, I had some good momentum for a while and really thought I was going to at least make the money.

My tournament play is still very much just based on my own experience and instinct; if I think about close decisions too much, I tend to err on the side of caution, and that ain't good in a multi-table tourney. Trusting my gut is good; what's bad is evaluating and tinkering with my usual style caused me to veer from what works so badly. I don't want to be too hard on myself though: Of the three Hold'Em formats I play--limit ring games, NL SnGs, and NL multis--NL multis are the format I have the least experience in.

I also played a $2.50+.25 multi at Pacific today. Didn't enjoy that at all--they start you with $800 and the levels increased every 5 minutes, which wasn't enough for an orbit in some cases. Ugh.

Ring Game Wins

Continuing my theme from 2 posts ago, I have been doing well at the $1/$2 tables at Pacific Poker. Up $60 at the ring games since I bought in. Had a session from 7pm to 7:40pm in which I won $39. Woo-hoo! I was at a great table--average pot $17, % players seeing the flop 49. When you have it, bet, and they will call. If they raise, fold. After playing on Party it still feels weird (in a very good way) to take down pots with top pair.

SnG Losses

Now I hate to use an unattributed quote, but I know that one of the poker bloggers I've been reading said something to the effect of "Bad poker blogger--blogging my wins but not my losses." I just surfed around a bit and I can't find it. Dang. That quote stuck with me because I feel the same way. It was my "big" win tonight that put me in the mood to write. For the sake of truth-in-blogging, I should mention that I lost 2 $5 SnGs on Pacific and 1 on Absolute. The Absolute loss I came in 4th and I don't know how I could've laid down my AQo given the circumstances, so I don't feel too bad about that. I'm going to give up on the Pacific SnGs; as with Party, it's a quicker blind structure given your starting stack, and I don't care for it.

Bigger Potatoes Next Weekend

Next weekend I'm hosting a more competitive game with some fellow board gamers. I get to show my poker table off to some folks who haven't seen it yet, and hopefully it may be the start of a new regular game for me. The format's gonna be $25 buy-in dealers choice for the first half of the evening (but I suspect standard casino games will be chosen most), followed by a NL Hold'Em tourney, buy-in still to-be-determined.

Lots of Poker Blogging

I added several more links on the right. The brand new ones include Burt Fu and Stay Away from the Dice. Fu has a post about magnetic (??) chips at the Borgata, and "The Foz" has a funny post about the Poker Stars micro-limit tables. Cool--there's a poker blogger out there who played lower limits than me this weekend :)
posted by James Torr at 12:25 AM

How to Read Cheap Thrills in Syndirella
In case anyone's interested in reading this blog in the Syndirella newsreader, here's how to do it:

1. Under the "Subscriptions" tab, click "Add Web Feed."
2. For the address, type http://cheapthrillsjd.blogspot.com/
3. For name, type "Cheap Thrills"
4. For "Title starts with," type "<div class="DateHeader">"
5. For "an ends with," type "</div>"
6. For "Description starts with," type "<div class="Post">"
7. for "and ends with," type "<div class="DateHeader">"
8. Click "Import"
posted by James Torr at 1:11 PM

It's All About Table Selection
I bought into Pacific Poker yesterday for the poker blogger tourney Iggy's organizing for the 16th. My username is ChpThrls, which I settled on after being frustrated that they wouldn't give me JD, **JD**, or similar variants because screen names must be 4-8 characters long, standard letters and digits only.

The software is pretty interesting. No frills such as 4-color decks or avatars. An odd chat window. No e-mailed hand histories, but they do have an interesting "game history" feature where you can watch a video replay of your hands.

The lobby shows the average pot size and the number of average number of players seeing the flop (flop%). Boy do I love having that latter statistic. Despite having read all the advice by Izmet Fekali and many others, I enjoy ring games more when the players are not crazy-loose maniacs. Not that I go looking for tight games. Loose is fine. It's passive players that I love, and I found them at Pacific last night :)

I played a little .50/$1 around 6pm last night. Flop% numbers at some tables were near 90, but I found one in the low 50s and made a couple bucks in a couple orbits. Then after the WPT I came back and the flop%s at .50/$1 were all way up there, so I sat down at a $1/$2 where the flop% was 44.

What a great passive table it was. These guys loved checking and folding. They were giving free cards, and when I was on a draw I was raising on the flop from late position to take advantage of that. I also bluffed at scare cards a couple times and it worked. It felt nice to make plays like that (and have them work) after the past couple weeks of crazy ring games on Party. I felt like I was running the table. 40 minutes (and +$43.50) into my session and our flop% was still 44, average pot size $14.53. Good stuff.

Then I foolishly tried a $5 SnG. I wanted to see what theyr SnGs were like, but it was foolish because 1) I left a very good table, and 2) I usually do well at either ring games or SnGs, but not both. Also it was pretty late in the evening. Sure enough I finished 5th.

Interesting Glitch

I did see a pretty interesting thing on the SnGs. When a player goes all in and 2 other players who can cover him call, 4 cards came on the flop. You read that right. When someone has gone all in pre-flop, but there is still betting between other players, 4 cards were dealt to the board, and the players in the hand were only able to bet twice, on the turn and river. This happened twice in the SnG I was in and a couple players there said they had seen the phenomenon before.

Anyway, back to the lesson I'm taking away from last night: It's all about table selection. At the risk of sounding like a weak-tight player, I think that weak-tight players are drawn to tables with low flop percentages and small pot sizes, where they feel that everyone else is playing like they do. The trick is to play better than them (who would've guessed?), which is easier if they are playing in a predictable, by-the-book manner. The average pot size and flop%s can't guarantee that the table you play at will be passive, but I find that flop% figures in the high 30s to low 50s, coupled with average pot sizes not more than 10x the BB, are a good sign. Unfortunately I'm looking at the Pacific lobby right now and I don't see anything that fits that bill. Guess I'll try back later . . .
posted by James Torr at 7:30 PM

VVP Quote of the Week: WPT Ladies' Night
And the Vince Van Patten quote of the week is . . .

What other travel agent in the world could possibly do that with her hands?

I'm not even trying to imply that this line could be taken as dirty out of context--I just thought it was a very VVP way of saying "Wow can she chip-shuffle."

I thought that Vince would be a lot more quotable tonight than he was--I think Mike had more colorful lines.

B hopped on my computer right after the WPT, leaving me to flip around on the boob tube for a few minutes. I stumbled upon Futurama on Cartoon Network, and they were playing poker. So here's a couple more quotes:

Bender: C'mon, let's deal. You'll have plenty of time to talk when you're poor.

Zoidberg: Look, I finally have a claw! Three human females, a number, and a king giving himself brain surgery.

Click here for last week's VVPQotW.
posted by James Torr at 11:14 PM

Poker Beer
I had a fantastic weekend. Specifically, a fantastic Saturday. About 18 of our coolest friends came over, we played board games through dinner, then did a NL Hold'Em tourney, then a group of the truly hardcore stayed for a ring game that lasted til 4am. The late hour is the reason this event didn't get blogged on Sunday -- I was too busy lying semi-catatonic on the couch watching bad movies (among them was Logan's Run, very fitting for my 30th birthday).

Poker Beer

But before I talk more about the festivities I have to mention the beer that B picked up for me -- it's simply called Poker Beer. They've got a website, www.pokerbeer.com, and a quick look shows that Poker beer is from the wonderful people that gave us Jolt Cola!

It's an obvious gimmick but a very amusing one. The label has two great slogans -- "I'll Raise You One!" in large print and in small print on the neck of the bottle, "For centuries, games and beer have gone hand in hand. Now, they're inseparable!"

Also on the neck is a 4-card poker hand, a different one on each bottle. The website confirmed that they are indeed random. When you pop the top, you get to see the 5th card under the bottlecap. We were speculating that if you got some monster hand maybe you won something via the website or something. Nope. It's just an amusing little touch.

But that little gimmick could be the starting point for some fun (read: moronic) drinking games, don't you think? Like everybody opens a bottle, and the guy with the worst hand has to chug. Or you could have two rounds of betting, for shots. Heh heh heh.

The most promising 4-card hand we had was 4 to a straight, which failed to complete. The best final hand in the 6-pack we had was Jacks and Eights.

The beer itself tasted just like MGD to me, which is a beer I'm fairly neutral on. As in, I'd never buy it myself but will happily drink it if offered.

The Game Day

We started off around noon with board games. Of the 18 guests in attendance, only about half are really into poker. This is a poker blog so I'll just mention that of the board games, I'm the Boss! was by far the biggest hit.

We finally made the move to poker around 8:30. By that time the poker players in the bunch were chomping at the bit to actually play poker on my beautiful poker table (I think I'm going to have to name her). Many of the non-poker players were interested but wary of buying in for much money, so we just started out with a $2 buy-in NL tourney. 14 players in all, so we split into two tables. 7 poor souls had to play on the boring old dining room table.

The start of the tourney also marked the start of me drinking in earnest. Everyone at my table was doing the "bet, call, call, call, call, call, call" thing, which due to the beer and the low limits I put an end to by raising ridiculous amounts with just about anything. It was awful poker but it made for a fun time. There was soon a lot of all-ins, yelling, and hooting at our table, along with several bust-outs, myself included. We soon had a merge, and a quorum of losers for another game of I'm the Boss!

By the time the tourney was over it was after midnight. Several people had to call it a night, and I figured we wouldn't get any ring game action in. I resigned myself to this, since it had been an incredibly fun day anway, and I cheerfully wished those exiting a good night.

It warmed my heart to turn and find 7 courageous souls (plus me and B) ready to start a ring game at 12:30! Our usual format for the last 6 months or so has been .25/.50 H.O.S.E. (Hold'em, Omaha Hi-Lo, 7-Stud, and 7-Stud 8 or Better Hi-Lo), $10 buy-in, and Saturday was no different. I think we should move to .50/$1, but I doubt I'll be able to convince everyone, and I'd rather play lower limits and have fun than raise them and drive anyone away.

Not too much to say about the poker play. It was better than the average .50/$1 table at Party. Yup, not saying much. Really it was more about the hanging out than it was about the poker play, and that's fine with me when it's the right crowd.

The coolest thing is that most everyone's a lot better than they were a year ago. Well, 2 of the players are pretty inexperienced (they've only played with us once before) and it showed. Another woman was a board gamer who hadn't played poker in years, but she did pretty well. My buddy Gene, one of the two regulars who is moving down to D.C. this week, showed the most improvement and walked away with $26 after a $10 buy-in. For a long time Gene was a biggest, um, "contributor" in our group, but no longer. He's still incredibly loose pre-flop and loves to raise, but in the past couple months he seems to have gotten over his aversion to folding, and boy has it helped him. I finished down $3. The final stacks took some swings when it was down to 4 players at the very end of the evening and we moved to a few rounds of dealer's choice that I only vaguely remember.

We finally called it a night a little after 4, but I was too keyed up to sleep. Hopped onto Absolute and played a $5 SnG. Figured I'd crash halfway into it, but to my surprise I was in the final 4 when dawn started to break. I'm a creature of the night, though. I shielded my eyes from that awful orb even as its rays drove away my luck. I soon went out when my A8 flopped two pair, and my all-in was called by A9o, who caught a 9 on the river. I groaned a perfunctory "doh!" and shuffled off to bed.

A Poker-Filled May

I've actually got poker lined up for the next two Saturdays. This coming weekend will be another .25/.50 game with a few friends in Boston (it's really just a semi-regular get-together with college friends, and a couple years ago we started playing nickel-dime poker instead of going out to bars). But the Saturday after that I'm going to be hosting a game with some of the board-gaming-poker-players who live around Boston that I played with once before a couple months ago (when I came in second in a $20 buy-in tourney). Those guys play .50/$1, sometimes NL with a $20 buy-in, and usually a $20 NL tourney to cap the evening. (So basically they player higher limits than anybody else I know.) Then the Saturday after that is a friend's bachelor party, at which I will certainly push for poker, and then after that is Memorial Day weekend, and with an extra day on the weekend I should certainly be able to get some poker in!

Seriously, playing live action poker, even for .25/.50, really made me remember how much I love it. Yesterday and today I felt no urge to play online poker, but boy was I tempted to head down to Foxwoods. B too, and she said we should've gone on Sunday if I had been so tired and hungover. Maybe next Sunday? . . .

Poker Table Note

My poker table received many compliments. It performed wonderfully, however, around 2 am I noticed that the rail was loose in one area. I remedied the problem earlier this evening, but am going to put the details of that in an addendum to my previous post on how I built the table, so that all the instructions are in one post.
posted by James Torr at 10:39 PM

My Poker Table Is Finished
I finally finished building my poker table!! Actually, I finished it this past Sunday, but have been waiting to post about it because I wanted to upload some pictures of it, and I had minor technical difficulties with my digital camera. But finally, here's a couple pictures:





What the heck, here's one more:




I had previously detailed the building of this puppy in this post, where I discussed buying he materials from casinosupply.com, and this post, where I discussed my concerns about the "perfect padded rail." On Sunday I ended up going over to a fabric store and buying some maroon vinyl (kinda reminded me of the color scheme at Binion's or the Barbary Coast) to cover up the padded rail that smelled unpleasantly like rubber. Perhaps that was the manufacturer's intention all along, that one would cover up the rubber? It didn't say anything to that effect on the website, and they did call it "perfect padded rail," so I assumed it was all I would need. Oh well.

Anyway, after cutting my spruce plywood into a 4'x6' oval (borrowed a friend's power saw), I did a little stencil-and-spray-paint job on what would become the underside of the table (just quickly spray-painted on an ace of hearts and an ace of clubs), so it would look just a little cooler sitting sideways in the back of our apartment when we're not using it.



The next steps were pretty easy -- I screwed on the folding table legs, along with a few door handles (6 of them) to make it easier to lift the table and turn it over. Then I attached the table foam using spray glue, folded it over the sides and staple-gunned it in underneath. Then I put on the felt, this time just staple-gunning it underneath.

Installing the Padded Rail

The padded rail was the toughest part. This stuff's hard to describe -- here's a picture -- essentially it's a hollow rubber tube with a slit in it, so that a cross-section of it looks like a "C." So first I cut the vinyl into long foot-wide strips and stapled the strips length-wise into the upper-inside of the "C." Then I put the 17' of rubber tubing onto the table, and fastened it using a mix of staple-gunning underneath and hammering a few nails right into the side of the "C" so that it went:

nail --> C --> edge of poker table

being very careful to keep the nails straight so they went into the plywood and not up through my precious felt. This was definitely the hardest part. By the way, the casinosupply.com website says that the padded rail can be attached using 3/4" staples. I didn't see anything bigger than 9/16" at Home Depot, but I didn't actually ask. Finally I took the vinyl and wrapped it around the rubber padding so it was nice and snug, and staple-gunned it to the bottom of the table. (I used almost an entire box of staples on this project.)

After that I just sprayed on some Scotch Guard. I think this caused some very faint discoloration on the felt, although my wife B thinks I'm just seeing things. Consider yourself warned.

Hmmm . . . I'm rereading this and worrying that my description is just detailed enough to be boring but not really detailed enough to be helpful. If you're thinking of working with that padded rail and have a question, feel free to drop me an e-mail.

------

This Sunday's my birthday, and on Saturday B and I are going to host all-day gaming to break this beauty in. Gonna break out some board games during the afternoon, then switch to poker after dinner. I've got 2 different buddies (and poker regulars) who are moving down to D.C. in the next few weeks, so this poker night will be the last time all the poker regulars of the past two years will be together. And for my 2 buds, my last chance to take their money!

Update, May 3

The railing ended up being a little too lose on the table. I think what happened was that when I stored the table, it rests on the side -- this compressed the rubber on one side and mae it "push out" so that it was quite loose on the two curved areas of that site. It "pushed out" so much that it pushed out the nails that were holding the rail in in those two curved areas.

I have remedied the problem by removing all the staples and nails I used to attach the rail, and then making the rail as tight as I could on the table. I ended up cutting off about 6 more inches, that's how loose it was.

I replaced the nails with with screws (#6 x 1.25" screws, to be exact). Instead of washers on the screws, I used 10 2" mending plates. These are just little 2" pieces of metal with two holes in them (they're kept in the door hinges area at Home Depot). Basically the two screws and the mending plate, all together, act as one big staple for the rail.

I put the mending plates directly onto the rubber rail, then pulled the vinyl back over it and restapled the vinyl to the bottom of the table.

The rail is now very tightly affixed to the table, and hopefully this'll be the last bit of repair that I need to do.

Update, June 6

Here's a couple pictures of a small cross-section of the padded rail, with the vinyl stapled to the inside of the "C":



And here's another picture of that cross-section from the side. You can see the two screws on the inside of the 'C":



The loose vinyl on the "under" side of the "C" gets stapled to the bottom of the table.

Also I received a question about how to deal with the fact that the padded rail was just under 17 feet long, while the vinyl I had was 6 feet long. Answer: I used 3 strips of vinyl. Here is another picture, showing how I folded the vinyl over where two strips met:



Finally, a reader mentioned to me that one might be able to purchase rubber pipe insulation instead of buying the perfect padded rail from casinosupply.com -- for all I know, that may be what casinosupply.com is really selling. My table's done so I'm not going to Home Depot to investigate, but anybody about to build a table may want to look into this less expensive possibility.

Hope this helps!
posted by James Torr at 11:00 PM

Possible Poker Comedy
Filmstew.com reports that MGM has paid $1 million for an "untitled poker pitch" from Don Rhymer (writer of Big Momma's House, The Santa Clause 2, and Agent Cody Banks 2):

Dylan Sellers will produce the comedy about three men who scheme a way to play in the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas without their wives finding out. Rhymer will write the script, and quickly, because MGM wants to go into production as soon as possible to ride the current poker wave.

Shade is currently in limited release in a few cities and as far as I know still scheduled for wide release on May 7.
posted by James Torr at 7:00 PM

VVP Quote of the Week
Tonight Cheap Thrills introduces a new weekly feature: the Vince Van Patten quote of the week. After the WPT airs yours truly will select one of Vince's many quips that stands out as particularly bizarre, inappropriate, hyperbolic, or even straight-out funny. It'll be like shooting fish in a barrel. And tonight's quote is (drumroll please):

Will he survive this pot or will it be his personal armageddon?

I'm hosting a home game this Saturday and you can be sure my guests will get real sick of hearing me ask that.

As a bonus here's the VVPQotW I selected from last week, but didn't post because I was too busy getting rivered at Party:

He has dug a hole, put the branches and twigs over it, and is waiting for a sucker to fall in.

Very entertaining WPT tonight. About 3/4 of the way through it noticed the weirdest thing: Vinny Vinh was wearing the exact same shirt I was (and still am as I type this). A greyish blue long-sleeve number from Old Navy, purchased at 2 for $20.
posted by James Torr at 11:13 PM

Jackpot Jay at ESPN.com
ESPN has a new poker columnist on the poker section of their website -- Jay Lovinger. He's going to be playing in the 2004 WSOP and chronicling his adventures until the 2005 WSOP. An excerpt:

I'm going to tell you about the metamorphosis poker has undergone, how it's wormed its way from the shadows into the klieg lights of American entertainment, and how the faces of its central characters have changed. How guys named Chan and Nguyen replaced road warriors like Amarillo Slim and Texas Dolly, how the game was wrenched from the hands of high school dropouts and pool hustlers and bootleggers by millionaire marketeers and mathematicians.

Sounds pretty cool.
posted by James Torr at 8:51 PM