BB/100
My last post was prompted in part by SirFWALGMan's post yesterday that he's a got a BB/100 hands rate of 4.89 over 2700+ hands at Party $2/$4. That prompted me to look up my own stat, which is 3.5 over 3500+ hands. Two thoughts then occurred to me. 1) I've been playing Party $2/$4 since July, so that's only 875 hands per month, 218 hands per week. I should play more, which was kinda the subject of my last post. 2) Not that I should be results-oriented or anything but is 3.5 a respectable win rate?

I went over to the forums at 2+2 to find out.

First thing I took from the posts there: 3500 hands is not nearly enough to be statistically meaningful. Damn those 2+2ers are stodgy about their statistics! You need like 100,000 hands for your sample size to be statistically significant, and by then you already know the answer to your question, or are beyond caring. That's one reason why I'm not much of a 2+2er. I much prefer the qualitative approach of the poker Blogosphere :-)

One thread I found was helpful. The thread is titled "2-4, 3-6, and 5-10" and was started on Oct. 22 (I don't know how to link to individual posts on 2+2). 2+2er Festus22 wrote:

For 2/4 in BB's/100,

1 - You're competent.

2 - You're good.

3 - You're excellent.

3.5+ - You're the man.

Subtract 0.25 to 0.50 from the above for each level up.

That's just a WAG.

I'm guessing "WAG" means wild-ass guess, but I'm not sure.

Then 2+2er Alobar said

1- You've read a book, and play tightly

2- you are decent

3- you are good

3.5+ why are you still playing 2/4?

Alobar is fueling my temptation to dabble in $3/$6! But honestly, I suspect my BB/100 rate may go down rather than up as my sample size becomes more statistically significant.

Finally, 2+2er bdk3clash says, "I think it's unproductive to fret about winrate and results when how you play is pretty much all you have control over." And of course he is right -- just sit down at every session and aim to make the correct decisions on every hand, and take confidence in your ability to do that rather than how much you won or lost. But it's nice to have some rough gauge of what the stats in Pokertracker indicate.
posted by James at 4:08 PM

Busy, Busy
Just an update on my poker over the last couple of weeks . . .

I finished 40th out of 133 in the blogger tourney. That's pretty typical of my tourney play: Decent, but not great; top 3rd, but not in the money. I lost when I went all-in with AJ against AK (a big, dumb mistake), so I cannot complain about bad beats.

I enjoyed the tourney quite a bit, though. I loved the better structure at Stars (too bad they have the best tourney players!). I think I've even come around to liking tourneys a bit more -- the blogger tourney reminded how much fun they can be. I just don't think I'm positive EV at them (my limited records indicate I'm below breaking even), whereas I know I'm positive EV at ring games and they are more my bag of chips. I lurked around until the very end, watching ToddCommish and MtDewVirus battle it out for 1st place. Fun stuff. The chat was great.

I've got my home game tonight (I cancelled it last week for the blogger tourney). About 5 weeks ago I started hosting a .25/.50 limit game (several players are poker newbies) on Thursday nights. We play one orbit each of Hold'em, Omaha8, and 7-Stud. We skip Omaha8 with fewer than 7 players. If you're near Providence and interested in such low stakes, drop me a comment or e-mail.

I started a weeknight game because B (aka Mrs. Cheap Thrills) and I have had our weekends all booked up for some time, and we keep missing the weekend games that some of our friends have organized. The past 2 weekends we had weddings, and this weekend we have another (October is the new June!). The weekend after that I've got a small boardgame convention (which will feature a $20 buy-in Hold'em tournament). This past Monday was B's birthday (she's 30 now, like me) so we went out for that. Finally, last week I finally joined a gym and all this week I have been sore all over.

With all this going on I managed to squeeze in some poker, but only about half as much as I would have liked. After my horrible session last Wednesday where I dropped $70 at Interpoker, I decided to go back to Party and grind out some wins. I actually re-deposited at Intertops because DuggleBogey at Go be Rude pointed out that they offer several freerolls for frequent players. On Sunday I had a lousy couple of sessions where I was up and down quite a bit, finally dropping $50. It didn't help that I was in bodily pain from working out for the first time in a looong time, and that Sunday afternoon I had had several beers at a local sports bar while watching the Pats-Jets game: tired and tipsy was I. During the second session I could tell I was playing awfully, folding winners and calling down with second-best. I take some comfort in the fact that I realized I was on a bit of tilt and promptly quit.

Then last night I won that back plus $20. Would've played more but I also played in a $500 freeroll that was restricted to players who had played 50 raked hands in the previous week. Only 113 players signed up. I finished 42nd -- unhappily reminiscent of my so-so finish in the blogger tourney. Intertops also offers $1500 and $3000 freerolls at the end of each month for playing 500 and 1500 raked hands. I am going to try and qualify for these next month, then have B play in them for me (and the Wednesday night freerolls), because she is better at tourneys than me.

Back to ring games, if I leave out the Interpoker unpleasantness, I've been treading water at Party $2/$4. I am reminded of HDouble's maxim that you only get better or worse at poker, you never stay the same, or as both he and Iggy have written, "stasis = death." I've taken over $500 out of Party $2/$4 since I made the jump to $2/$4 back in July, but I've been playing less lately and doing worse. This is what heppened to me last year when football season and then the holidays came around: I played a lot less, and lost my feel for the game. The answer, then, must be to play more! After 3500+ hands my BB/100 hands figure is 3.5, and I feel it could be higher.

As I already said, though, I've got my home game tonight and then tomorrow we're headed up to a wedding in Rochester. Both should be a blast, but the Party $2/$4 games will have to wait. We get back Sunday, but that's Halloween, so I'll probably be back in the saddle on Monday.

The other big thing on my poker radar: Foxwoods. The World Poker Finals have already started down there. The big WPT event will be going on November 13-17. I am determined to get down there during that time, both to play and to see a WPT event in person. Also, Felicia is going to be there, and it would be cool to meet her! I just need to find the time. I'm free the weekend of the 13th, so I'm thinking B and I will definitely head down then -- but I also may try and get down there during a weeknight next week to get a few hous of live play. I will definitely post here once I decide on a day.

This isn't my most interesting post ever but I'm glad I'm staying current with my blog and the poker Blogospshere. Hopefully next week I'll have more Cheap Thrills to report :-)
posted by James at 11:19 AM

Something for Nothing: Luck in America
I was reading Tuesday Morning Quarterback today (I recommend him to all NFL fans), and he recommended a book that might be of interest to the poker world: Something for Nothing: Luck in America, by Jackson Lears. Here's the Publisher's Weekly description from Amazon.com:

Public moralists cannot abide the obsessive gambler. They bemoan the disintegration of a solid work ethic and condemn the search for the quick buck, the belief that it's possible to get something for nothing. But Lears, a historian at Rutgers and editor of the journal Raritan, finds a much more complex issue at the heart of gambling in America, one that raises fundamental ethical, religious and philosophical questions that strike at the very core of our culture. He writes, "Debate about gambling reveals fundamental fault lines in American character, sharp tensions between an impulse toward risk and a zeal for control. Those tensions may be universal, but seldom have they been so sharply opposed as in the United States, where longings for a lucky strike have been counterbalanced by a secular Protestant Ethic that has questioned the very existence of luck." Lears offers a history of conflicting attitudes toward luck, beginning with early English settlers and continuing up to September 11, 2001. The book often reads like a course in Western Civilization, moving easily among the disciplines of religion, history, literature, art, economics, philosophy and science. And yet the vast assemblage of information becomes so overwhelming, it's easy to lose the book's primary thread; i.e., the ways that gambling, chance and luck have shaped American culture. Furthermore, the emphasis on men as the primary actors is too narrow; where are the women in this cultural history? Despite its flaws, however, this challenging, erudite and original book is a significant contribution to American cultural studies.

Many a poker player and many a poker blogger has ruminated on the nature of luck, and how important it is to be aware of the roles that both luck and skill play in the game. Good poker players know that your successes are not due to skill alone, and your losses are not necessarily a result of poor play; bad players have a hard time with these realities. This book sounds like a really in-depth discussion of the two mentalities, and could provide some interesting perspective on the poker boom.
posted by James at 2:59 PM

Bring on the Blogger Tourney
I am signed up for the PokerStars blogger tourney. Despite having played very little no-limit recently, and no tourneys at all for the past months or so, I am confident I will do well. I am going to rely on a stratagem I've code-named "Operation Ludicrous Dumb Luck." Heh heh heh.

Seriously, I've blogged before that tourneys aren't my specialty, but they are a lot of fun with the right crowd. So I expect tonight to be a hoot even if I get my virtual butt handed to me.

My username on PokerStars is LanceyH, after Lancey Howard from The Cincinnati Kid, and my PokerStars image is a parrot head, which is cropped from the logo for Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville bars and restaurants.

Minor Site Changes

In other news, I changed over to Blogger commenting (I'd been using Haloscan before). My understanding is that Haloscan deletes comments after 6 months or so, whereas Blogger doesn't. So in switching, I lost all the comments on my first hundred posts or so :-( but I would have lost them eventually anyway, and this seems a better decision for the long term.

I also deleted the Absolute Poker banner from my site. I had been a bit of a cheerleader for AP 5 or 6 months ago, when they were handing out a ton of bonuses. But about 2 months ago or so they changed the requirements for the bonuses and now they're just too hard to clear. Better bloggers than I are affiliates for the top-quality sites, so I am going to retire from the affiliate business, which was none too profitable for me anyway.

Finally, I tweaked my template code so that my posts end with "posted by JD." This is so if B (Mrs. Cheap Thrills) wants to post sometime, you'll be able to tell it's her.

Looking forward to playing with everyone tonight.
posted by James at 1:05 PM

Interpoker, yuck.
Ugh, I just finished up an awful evening at Interpoker. (Not to be confused with Intertops Poker, which I just blogged about 2 posts ago.)

Seeing how well my bonus whoring at Intertops had gone, I decided to chase down some of the other bonuses my fellow bloggers have been talking about. Interpoker is part of the Cryptologic group of sites, and it offers players 100% match bonus up to $90 -- each month.

Too bad their software sucks. Possibly worse than Pacific Poker or Pokertropolis, and that is saying something. The games were soooooo slooooooow. I was 2-tabling, and it seriously felt like single-tabling at other sites, there was so much downtime. I might've tried 3-tabling if I had a bigger monitor.

Plus I was losing. The lowest level for limit Hold'em is $1/$2, and there were no-folders galore. I knew how to beat that kind of game once upon a time, but I never enjoyed it all that much, and now I generally avoid it. Despite knowing deep-down that my set of tens losing to a straight on the river is positive EV, I still find the constant suckouts disheartening. All in all, just not my idea of fun, even for a $90 bonus.

Another annoying thing about the software is the waiting lists. Tonight most of the games were full, and when you get on the waiting list for the next availble $1/$2 game, the next game is often a 1/2 games that is being played in pounds. So really it is more like a $2/$4 game, but if you refuse to take a seat, you go off the waiting list. Some of pounds tables were just a bit less crazy than the dollar tables, so I played them for a bit, but if I'm gonna play $2/$4 I might as well play at Party.

I kept telling myself, OK, just fold, fold, fold to clear this bonus, but after about 250 total hands out of the necessary 450 raked hands, I am giving up. Oh yeah, I am down $70. Screw it. I'm headed back to Party, where the software has grown on me and where I can actually practice table selection.

But the final annoying straw is that I cannot cash out until I receive a pin number from them via snail mail. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Fortunately I've got some money in Neteller and other sites, so I won't have to go poker-free while I wait for this pin.
posted by James at 12:38 AM

I Want to See Ring Games on TV
Taking quick stock of the poker-on-TV phenomenon, at this point I think we have two kinds of events.

1) High-profile multi-table tournaments editied and televised for TV. Obviously, the WPT and the WSOP dominate this category.

2) Single-table tournmanents edited and televised for TV. FoxSportsNet's Late Night Poker (which I haven't caught enough of) falls into this category, as does Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown, the WPT Celebrity Home Game and other single-table events, ESPN's recent Tournament of Champions (the one Annie Duke won), and Fox Sports Net's Superstars Invitational Tournament.

The main attraction of category #1 is a certain degree of realism, what I'd call the "sporting event" element of a poker tournament: You are watching an actual contest that people have paid to enter and which is being played for real money; ostensibly it is being held to try and determine who the best player is.

But as we all know, the WPT likes to play up the personalities of the players at the final table, in the hopes of making it more interesting and generating more viewers.

Category #2 arose from the simple realization that, rather than just hoping that interesting personalities make the final table, TV producers could simply have a single-table event and invite only players who the audience wants to see. At first these personality-players were celebrities from music, movies, and TV; now that poker players are becoming celebrities, we have events like the Tournament of Champions.

I'm not going to argue about the pros and cons of each type of event, or which I prefer to watch. Instead I'm more interested in the question of what is next for poker on TV.

I should say that my approach to this question is colored by a personal opinion that I know not everyone shares: I'm not very big on tournament poker and much prefer ring games. This hasn't stopped me from enjoying all the poker that is on TV, but more and more I find myself watching for the personalities and the banter rather than the actual poker play.

To some degree I have become bored by the pre-flop all-in, which dominates poker on TV. The thinking seems to be that this is where the drama is: A player has committed all his chips, someone may be eliminated, and isn't the suspense just killing you? And I can't argue that it's a very dramatic moment in a poker tournament. But even many very casual poker-on-TV watchers must've realized the truth by now: Once both players are all-in, there is no more skill involved and you are just watching a dealer flip cards. I worry that poker on TV cannot survive on the preflop all-in alone.

Fortunately the preflop all-in is far from the only dramatic moment in a poker tournament. You've also got bluffs, traps, post-flop all-ins, and other situations. Bravo's extension of Celebrity Poker Showdown to 2 hours and ESPN's extended coverage of the WSOP main event seem to indicate that TV producers are getting better at finding those other moments.

My other problem with poker on TV is a problem I have with tournament poker in general. When Mike Sexton says, "Folks, let me tell you, it is not that easy to bet $400,000 when you're only holding second pair," I always have to suppress an urge to say something to the effect of "Yeah, but he's not really betting $400,000 of real money, is he, Mike?" (Mrs. Cheap Thrills has heard me say things like this a lot when watching the WPT, and now finds it quite annoying.)

Every poker player knows that tournament poker and ring game poker are not the same thing. One huge difference is that in tournament poker, your risk is limited to the amount of your buy-in. The producers of poker on TV seem intent on downplaying this fact.

As well they might. It's much more shocking to say that a player "lost" $600,000 in single hand, when really that player has already made the final table, is guaranteed $100,000 in prize money, and now is just making a strategic decision about how he might move up in the prize pool. To say that he "lost" $600,000 is more dramatic. (And if TV producers downplay the fact that real money is in fact not being wagered, they certainly don't want viewers to know about final table deals.)

I am not trying to bash tournament poker. Let me reiterate that I realize tournament poker is incredibly popular, and not everyone share's my view that tournament poker is not "real" poker. Tournament poker on TV is obviously widly successful. But couldn't ring games be just as popular -- or even more so?

For a lot of people -- I have no way to prove it is a majority, and I would agree that the proportion is probably shrinking -- poker means ring games. When I go to Vegas or to Foxwoods, I don't usually go during tournaments, but the poker rooms are filled anway. When I play with my friends at home, we play regular poker much more often than we bother to organize a tourney.

So I want to see ring games on TV. I want them to be the next big thing for poker on TV. The clear attraction to ring games on TV would be that Americans really do want to see people succeed or fail in the most dramatic fashion possible, and in poker, that means winning and losing large sums of real money. As Iggy recently wrote about the Andy Beal and his high-stakes ring game with the "Corporation": "They should put THAT freaking game on TV. Screw this WPT stuff."

Yet I still sometimes hear or read objections to ring games on TV. Stuff like "Ring games are boring." See above: People losing and winning large sums of real money, America fasinated with poker. Or the objection that "Pros would not want to their hole cards revealed in big-money games." Yeah, that's also what they said about televised big-time tournaments. Or, "Pros don't have any incentive to play in televised ring games." Four little words, people: To be on TV. Publicity has become king, even for many in the poker world.

The best objection to televised ring games is the simple fact that without the structure of a tournament, there will be no single winner. And isn't having a single winner, with everyone else busting out, really nice and dramatic? What enables TV to put a beginning an end on what we all know is really one lifelong game?

Well, let's not forget that the first World Series of Poker in 1970 consisted of Johnny Moss and other top professionals playing ring games in public, for publicity for Binion's. At the end of a specified period the players simply voted for who they thought was best (Mr. Moss, of course).

That concept could translate really well into the modern realm of reality TV and televised poker. Some ideas that I think could either be great or awful, depending on execution:

--Get 6-8 pros together and have them play for a few hours, or maybe play for several sessions over a few days. Donate some money to the pros' favorite charities or something. Edit out the boring stuff, keep all the banter and all the great bluffs and confrontations, all of it for real cash that the players really win or lose. Maybe keep the players' final cash totals a secret; have a national audience -- or a panel of fellow pros -- vote on who played best.

--Get 3-4 pros together with 3-4 amateurs and televise the "fish" trying to hold their own with the big boys. Have pros comment on the action; Howard Lederer could give lessons afterward. Have that same voting on which amateur plays best. Maybe the amateur voted best wins a prize; or maybe he just keeps his winnings.

--Forget the pros altogether. Get one of the card rooms in Vegas to dedicate one or more of their middle- or high-limit tables to a TV show. Folks entering the card room would be informed that by sitting at that table they agree to be televised -- you just know that folks would be lining up around the street. Record all the craziness that happens at one table in a Vegas poker room in the course of a week -- fights, drunkenness, bad players losing their shirts, everything -- edit it, and air it. Maybe ask the most entertaining players back for some kind of battle of the amateur champs.

Hey, it could happen.

Update: See my February 4, 2005, Live at the Bike post.
posted by James at 3:59 PM

Intertops
I've had an account at Party Poker since April 2003, and an account at Empire since August 2003. Last week I finally tried out that other Party skin, Intertops Poker.

I'd read about people having problems creating an account on Empire after they already had one on Party. I had no problems with that, perhaps because I created my Empire account before certain security measures were in place. But I did have some problems creating an Intertops account. Both Grubby's page and Bonuswhores.com lead you to believe that creating an account at multiple Party skins is no problem at all, but this is not quite the case. (Since they are affiliates of Intertops, I assume they did not want to list detailed procedures for getting around the things that discourage accounts on multiple Party skins.)

First, I used a different e-mail address than I had for Party/Empire. Second, I uninstalled Party and Empire from my computer. Then I downloaded and installed Intertops and tried to create an account. I successfully created the accoiunt, and got a user name and password, but when I tried to log in it wouldn't let me -- the error message said I had another account at their poker room.

So I went online and read about possible solutions. One person said to delete all my cookies, and then go through my registry (run regedit) and delete anything with a reference to Party Poker. I did that. No go.

The solution turned out to be this, which I got from the forums at bonuswhores.com:

You just have to delete the cookie reg key.

Its under Current User > Local Machine > Software > Calculator > UCID key.

That's what freezes more than 1 party skin.

Presto!

Intertops gives you an annoyingly ugly username and password composed of a random string of letters and numbers. It's annoying because there's now way you'll be able to remember them if you want to, say, log on to Intertops from another computer. I didn't find a way around this. While you don't seem to be able to change the user name you log in with, you can choose a different name for your "avatar" in the poker room. I went with MilesV, in tribute to the plucky hero from the sci-fi series by Mary McMaster Bujold. OK, so I'm a nerd.

The Intertops software is just like Party/Empire, except the color scheme is red and black.

I've won just under $300, plus my signup bonus, at $2/$4 Hold'em in the past week and half. Woo-hoo! (Getting in a bit of poker at Sunday NFL halftimes has been lucky for me so far.)

As many other bloggers have noted, when you go to cash out from Intertops via Neteller, you must first move your money from the poker room to the sports book; then you can cash out to Neteller. The effect of this is to add a day to cashout times, since you must do two moves that often take an overnight. The other effect, of course, is to tempt you to bet on sports. I actually may leave $20 or so in the Intertops sports book for the NFL season -- you can bet as little as $1, so it seems like a cheaply thrilling way to dabble in football betting.

My first cashout was to take out $60 to deposit in PokerStars for the upcoming poker blogger tourney. The cashout requests from the Intertops sports books are a little annoying in that you do not receive any confirmation or transaction number. Instead it just says you will receive your money in 24 hours. After 24 hours elapsed and I didn't receieve my money, I e-mailed them. Turns out the problem was my e-mail address. To creat the Intertops account, I had used a different e-mail address than the one I used for Party/Empire. Well, this is also a different e-mail address than the one I have linked to Neteller. I was able to change my e-mail address in the Intertops Poker area, but the sports book page provides no way to change your e-mail address! Fortunately once I e-mailed them all was well, and my cashout then processed.

Final verdict: With all the minor hassles, the only reason to play at Intertops over Party or Empire is the bonuses. But that's a heck of a good reason.

Update, October 21

I know a lot of people don't read the comments when they browse blogs, so I felt I should add this correction to my post from DuggleBogey at Go be Rude:

The other reason to play Intertops over Party is the freerolls. The $1500 and $3000 freerolls that require raked hands at the end of the month have had less than 200 people in them. Extremely juicy.
posted by James at 10:35 AM

The Stardeck
Here's a kinda interesting link I had forgotten about: www.stardeck.com. The Stardeck is an 5-suited deck. The 5th suit is stars.

I ordered two of these Stardecks about 3 or 4 years ago when the only poker I was really playing was .5/.10 wild-card games with some friends from college. It was usually B, me, and 3 other couples, so that made 8. A lot of the crazy wild-card games are 7-Card Stud variants, and as the Stardeck website proclaims, the Stardecks can be used to play 8-handed 7-card Stud. However, it does throw the poker hand ranking off a bit, since with the 5 suits flushes are harder to make than full houses. The Stardeck website also has suggestions for Stardeck-only poker variants.

I haven't used my Stardecks in a while, but now and then I get the urge to when it gets late and punchy at our home game. Three of four years ago they were a hit, as everyone enjoyed the novelty factor. But I haven't spring them on anyone since the poker boom really started, and I bet I'd be more likely to run into a self-proclaimed purist snubbing his nose at the poor Stardeck :-)

I've also heard of nautical-themed six-suited decks, in which the 5th and sixth suits are blue anchors and ship's steering wheels. Haven't been able to track one down though.
posted by James at 5:36 PM

The Legality of Poker, Online and Off
This a topic I've mentioned in the past, but I've never really devoted a post to it. And few things have happened recently to make me get semi-fired up about it again. The first part of this post has to do with traditional, brick & mortar poker, and the second has to do with online poker. [Warning: Some of what follows comes dangerously close to politics, a subject I generally try to avoid. Apologies in advance for boring or controversial content.] First, B&M.

The Legality of Traditional, Brick & Mortar Poker

We almost had a referendum here in Rhode Island about letting the Narragansett Indians (in conjunction with Harrah's) build a casino to compete with Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun in Connecticut. The Rhode Island state legislature voted to include the referendum on the November ballot, then the governor vetoed the move, then the legislature voted to override the veto. Finally, last month the governor brought the whole thing before a state court, which ruled that gambling in Rhode Island is illegal unless it is run by the state, and so the referendum was nixed.

I never really thought the casino had a chance. (There was a ton of opposition to it, much of it from Lincoln Park, a dog-racing track that also has slots.) But I had harbored some hope that the referendum might generate some real discussion of the pros and cons -- beyond the two billboards, for and against, that Harrah's and Lincoln Park had put up along I-95 -- and at the very least show how voters really feel. And if they feel strongly, then maybe that state constitution should be amended. But like I said, no chance. Not even a referendum.

There are a lot of arguments for and against traditional, offline gambling, and there are a lot of arguments about whether poker should be cast in with other forms of gambling -- and I don't want to get into too much of that here. I'll try to summarize my own view as briefly as possible: Despite being an avid poker player and frequent visitor to the Las Vegas Strip, I do not think that gambling should be totally legal and easily available everywhere. But I think that communities should be able to decide for themsleves about it --and reconsider their decision every few decades or so -- and that's what irked me about the episode here in Rhode Island.

Gambling is widely considered a vice, similar to pornography, drugs, booze, and smoking. For each of these vices, you've got your libertarian freedom-lovers who say that government has no right to restrict them. And for each of these vices, you've got your doomsayers, who say that if you allow these vices, we're, well, doomed, and therefore they must be outlawed.

My view is that people disagree about vices and always will. So what happens in practice is that for each of these vices America has come to very imperfect, generally controversial solutions. For drugs, the laws are pretty harsh. For alcohol, well, it was prohibited for a decade or so, it's been back for a while now, some states are very restrictive, and others aren't. Smoking was considered no problemo, then in the 1990s America changed its mind on that one -- the laws really vary from state to state but the main theme is tax, tax, tax.

What I'm getting at here is that for vices, legal arguments about rights and freedoms don't generally win the day (sorry, libertarians). In the long run, vice policies are mostly determined by public opinion about the vice in question. For example, drug laws are so harsh for many reasons, but a big one in is that most Americans are OK with harsh drug laws. Smoking is currently under attack in large part because fewer Americans are smoking. The tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, in my opinion, were a very messy business, but I feel they were mostly a result of changing public opinion rather than any surprise revelations about smoking's health effects or the way the tobacco companies were doing business.

In general, I think this system works. I feel that when it comes to vices, communities should be able to use the law to create the kind of community they want. I don't think that states should have to use medical evidence about secondhand smoke to ban smoking in public places -- they should just be able to ban it on the grounds that the community finds it objectionable, just as they do public urination and very loud music. The downside is that the majority will tend to limit the freedoms of the minority, but we don't want people peeing everywhere, do we? (Notice how I use a joke to sidestep a deep philosophy-of-government question. Ahh, so clever.)

Back to poker. Wouldn't it be nice if states could just decide for themselves whether or not they want to have gambling in their state, and how much? It certainly seems like public opinion would support the legalization of gambling in more states. (Damn I wish Rhode Island had had that referendum, I bet it woudl have been a damn landslide :) America appears to have fallen in love with gambling.

Which begs the question, Is a backlash inevitable? Will the debate over poker only really begin once the mainstream media has a truly tragic story about somebody who lost his or her family's lifetime savings at the tables? So that then the freedom-lovers and doomsayers can really have something to argue about? Ugh.

No, the debate is rarely framed in terms of communities, or states, or the nation, deciding to what degree vices should be restricted. (Booze is the greatest exception here, and that was only after a big experiment in the 1920s.) Instead, it's usually all-or-nothing.

In Rhode Island, the state constitution says no, and that's that, no referendum, no debate. So states play legal games, and decisions are made based on technicalities, of which there are many since federal and state gambling laws are largely a mess. For example, Pennsylvania now has more slots machines than any other state except Nevada, because the state legislature decided that they are not slot machines but rather "video lottery terminals" and the lottery is legal in Pennsylvania (just as it is in Rhode Island and so many states). As a poker player it drives me nuts that the games with most negative EV are the only ones being allowed, but this trend has been going on for a while.

California, that very special state, was able to legalize poker rooms by reasoning before the courts that poker involves a skill element. Why have so few other states pursued this tactic? I don't have a good answer to that question. Instead I'll offer, only partly in jest, an alternative: Maybe we poker players should start arguing that poker is not a game of skill, but that is indeed a form of lottery!

The Legality of Online Poker

As I said before, the arguments about traditional gambling and how it should be regulated are longstanding and, for many states, pretty much resolved for the time being. But online gambling is a different animal.

Ever since Moneymaker won the WSOP -- having won his buy-in through what the U.S. government deems to be illegal Internet gambling -- I've been waiting for a debate about the legality of online poker to enter the mainstream. I honestly thought that Moneymaker's win would be more shocking, not in the "he was such an underdog sense," but in the "he won $10,000 though online gambling and now he's famous and oh my goodness what message does this send about respect for the law" sense. It never happened. Maybe the guy's just too likable. Still, despite countless articles talking about the spread of poker, despite an incredibly huge increase in online poker and another WSOP won by an Internet player, I am still waiting for any real debate or controversy. Why?

For starters, I must admit that realities of regulation are very different. Communities and states cannot decide for themselves about online poker. Well, they can decide, but if they decide no they can't do a whole lot to prevent people from playing anyway. In this respect, online gambling is unlike the vices of booze, drugs, and smoking, and much more like that other online vice, pornography. The U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court are still wrestling over how obscenity laws and the First Amendment apply to online pornography. While they do, the smut business is booming, and maybe the feds feel a little helpless. It doesn't seem too much of a stretch to say that the government is wary of the intersection between vice and the Internet, and I can see how they wouldn't want to open up a new can of worms.

You might be thinking, "Yup, for both porn and poker, the Internet takes the government out of the picture, and let's people decide for themselves." And that's more or less been the case with online gambling so far. Score one for personal freedom. But I worry that this analogy to online pornography does not bode well for the hope that online poker might eventually become legal, since many Americans view the growth of online pornography as the very worst thing about the otherwise neat-o Internet.

But here I am, stuck on public opinion, and the idea of the American public deciding how to deal with a controversial vice. That doesn't seem to be how it works.

In contrast to my naive views on how gambling policy should reflect public opinion, the consensus in the gambling world is that in reality it is all about the money. (But then, that's what a gambler would say, isn't it?) Take, for example, flipchippro's recent comments regarding the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas:

A large convention of gaming industry employees and experts from around the world gather in Las Vegas every year to discuss and guide the gaming industry into the future. Much of the discussions will center around the legality of online gaming and the influence it has on land based casinos. I believe it is only a matter of time until the US gets in step with the rest of the world and makes online poker legal. The big casino owners are finally beginning to realize that just like the once feared and hated Indian Casinos, online casinos are not only a good thing, but are providing the fuel for the current incredible popularity rise of gambling and poker in particular. When the first major land based casino moves into the online market the online gaming industry will quickly become legal and the US government will be the benefactor of all those tax dollars now flowing out of the country. The feds or individual states can also regulate and control the industry providing the consumers with confidence in getting a fair, unbiased game. I believe that we online scribes with our worldwide reach must become part of the effort to organize this movement to legalize and regulate online gaming.

(Here's another quality post from flipchippro on this topic.)

For anyone new to this line of thinking, I'll just add that what goes unsaid in flipchippro's quote is the idea that online gambling has remained illegal in large part because Las Vegas and others with an interest in currently legal forms of gambling oppose it. (Just like Lincoln Park opposed the Narragansett Indian casino.) The influence of the Las Vegas gambling industry is believed to be such that their opposition to online gambling would be more than enough to kill any effort to legalize it. As flipchippro says, if the Las Vegas casinos should embrace online gambling, so might the the federal government, since they could tax the heck out of it if it was run by regulated corporations within U.S. borders.

Though I worry it's a little pessimistic, I basically agree with flipchippro's main point, which is that the best hope for legal, online poker is to convince the relevant parties (the legal gambling industry and the U.S. government) that they'll make money off it. But while I feel it's the best hope, we should remember that the Mirage did try to get into online gambling just last year. Then again, as poker players know, a lot can change in a year.

Don't Rock the Boat?

And the change continues. The WSOP will go "on tour" next year, attempting to bring a famously Vegas poker experience to the rest of the country. And of course it will be televised, and the major online sites will probably provide super-satellites for each and every WSOP Circuit event. How long before some lottery-only state decides it wants in on the action? How long before anyone starts to care that it's largely sustained by an unregulated, possibly illegal activity?

Maybe never. Maybe online poker will continue to exist in a legal gray area, with hundreds of thousands of Americans happily playing, and the government not saying a word. Hmmm . . . maybe that's not so bad -- it's certainly better than backlash against gambling. The pessimist in me wants to end on that note and go play some online poker. The optimist in me thinks we should strive for more, because making online poker clearly legal would bring countless more players into the game. Wait, no, that's the greedily optimistic poker player in me saying that. The true optimist in me thinks we should strive for more so that the law reflects Americans' real views on poker and gambling, and an activity that millions of responsible Americans enjoy can formally become a legitmate hobby instead of being viewed as a possibly illegal vice.
posted by James at 12:04 AM

Get Serious
Time to take stock, time to assess my game, time to try and figure out why I'm not raking in more money.

I was kicking ass and taking names for much of the summer. In June I finally got the hang of 2-tabling. In late July I made the jump to $2/$4 and started winning money in amounts that, compared to my previous year of playing .50/$1, seemed positively huge. In August I played for the highest stakes of my life -- $3/$6 -- at the cooest poker room in the country -- the Mirage in Las Vegas -- and won.

Since then, I've mostly been treading water. Win a little, lose a little. Example: I bought in this past Wednesday at Party for $320, and got a 20% percent bonus. I cashed out on Saturday with $300. It felt like I only lost 5 big bets but PokerTracker -- which pays no heed to bonuses -- knows the truth: I lost $84. Then I took $200 over to Empire for their 10% bonus. Again, cleared it in no time, and when I did I had $210 -- again, I could tell myself I won $10, but really I lost $10. Kept on playing on Sunday after the Pats won, was up $180, then lost it all back. What happened to my game?

A lot of things, but my recent experiences in Las Vegas stand out. I can't emphasize enough how happy I am about those August wins in Las Vegas. There's been a little devil on my shoulder telling me that I should try even higher limits, and he won't go away. What he forgets is that I played against mostly poker-newbie-tourists in Las Vegas, and the competition online plays very differently (mainly more aggressively).

Another thing is that I became really hooked on live play. I used to think that playing poker in the casino was kinda boring, because of the slower pace. But at some point in Las Vegas I learned to really watch the action and the players. When I was "in the zone" I usually knew how I stood in any given hand -- when to slowplay, when to bluff, when to value bet, and so forth. Casino poker newbies really telegraph a lot of information, not so much through obscure tells but through obvious stuff like their facial expressions or grabbing for chips early. And a lot of times I couldn't point to anything specific, but would just have a vibe about whether I was going to take down the pot or not. As Kevin Nealon says in Happy Gilmore, "Doing the Bull Dance, feeling the flow. Working, working."

I was able to loosen up a bit, for example, when I knew I could get in for one bet with a marginal holding, or when I knew that I could steal a pot because my opponent was unhappy with his hand.

Online, I don't have any of that. The first thing I did to fix my game was tighten back up, but it's been hard getting back to just concentrating on betting patterns -- it's like I have one fifth the information, and I'm never too sure where I am in a hand. Plus, watching betting patterns, in comparison to watching real live people, is a little boring, and I've been reading blogs and stuff while playing online. Not good.

Finally, I got away with drinking while playing in Las Vegas. It helps me keep the table mood light and fun, and, to a certain point (which I crossed at Odogg's bachelor party), I can usually be a little drunk and stay focused on the game. At home, in front of the computer, having more than one beer just worsens my not-watching-the-betting-patterns problem.

So what's the solution? Well, I could head down to Foxwoods. And I do want to tackle the $4/$8 game down there. But that's not really a solution. I need to be able to transition between online and live play. I need to get back to my online A-game, which means no drinking and more concentration. Focus is the key. And less hubris -- the money isn't going to fall in my lap (although it's wonderful when it seems that way), I have to work for it.

Really, what I need to do is get back to taking online play more seriously. It's my never-ending balancing act between having fun, improving my game, and staying profitable. I've blogged about it before, and I'll probably blog about it again. It is fun to steal the blinds with the Hammer. It is fun to grab another Sam Adams as I'm playing. It is fun to 2-table, watch football, listen to Boot Liquor, and read Iggy's latest post at the same time.

Now and then I have to remind myself that it's more fun to win.
posted by James at 2:22 PM

Pretty Amazing
On Friday this blog turned six months old. So for six months I've been blogging, and for six and half months I've been reading poker blogs. I don't think I can really describe just how much blogging, and following other poker bloggers, has enhanced my game and my appreciation for the game.

If I had to pick I'd say that reading other poker bloggers has probably helped me more than my own blogging. The range of perspectives out there is just amazing. I've followed other low limit players as they learned the game. Some of them have had great success, some have busted out. I've followed pros, some of whom have had great success, and some of whom have busted out. I've followed tournament and ring game players, sit-n-go experts and short-handed specialists, fans of limit and no-limit, Hold'em, 7-Stud, and pot-limit Omaha. I've followed players who live in Vegas, and players who live in France, players who blog about the WPT and WSOP as they're watching them, and players who don't have cable. I've read countless casino trip reports, and countless tales of drunken home game craziness. I've followed players as they analyze their game with statistics, and as they ponder what attracts us all to the game. (I could do with fewer bad beats stories, though! :-)

You can't get that range of perspectives from a library of poker books, or from a lifetime subscription to Card Player. I imagine the only way to possibly top it would be to quit your day job, move to Vegas, and chat up everyone in the card room all night long, every night.

But I gush. To sum up: It's a pretty amazing little community.
posted by James at 2:11 PM