White Belt Poker

The EPT Scandinavian Open finished on Sunday night with Denmark’s own Mads Andersen taking the first prize of 2.5m Kr (that’s £235,000, or $420,000) after entering the final table with a big chip lead. The final table took ten hours to play (the longest EPT final table so far) and incredibly, the players came within half an hour of the casino’s official closing time!! (Yes, some European casinos close in the early hours). I’ll bet EPT boss John Duthie was a little nervous given the amount of trouble he’s had organising venues for the EPT, and in particular after the fiasco in Barcelona last year. This month’s Card Player Europe has an article all about how Duthie put together the EPT here. It’s interesting to read about why there are hardly ever any cash games at EPT events.

The two PokerStars qualifiers who made the final table (Markus Gonsalves and Anina Gundesen) finished 5th and 6th respectively. Anina had said she wasn’t intimidated by any of her opponents because she had no idea who any of them were. I must confess that I’d barely heard of any of them either.

As ever, the PokerStars blog has a detailed final table report, in which writer Howard Swains deserves a special award for straining the “playground of the rich” metaphor about as far it it will go:

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about where I want to go as a poker player over the next year. Should I concentrate on a particular type of game or should I branch out more, with the inherent risk that I just become a weak jack of all trades? I’m actually very conscious of not becoming one of these people who only ever plays hold’em, particularly no-limit. I tell people I love playing poker, so I think that brings with it a certain responsibility to be an all-rounder if at all possible. The key to doing that though is to know when you should begin learning the other games so that you don’t spread yourself too thin. I feel as if I can afford to do that now.

Above all, I like to think of poker as a kind of continuum and I’m playing my part in that continuum by participating in as many forms of the game as I can, which means that I’ve played a miniscule part in helping poker survive after I’m gone. I found it tremendously disappointing to read a recent interview with Antonio Esfandiari where he said that he only plays no-limit hold’em because he finds other games (especially limit hold’em) “boring”. That doesn’t sound like a man who loves the game to me, although I’m sure he’s in the minority when it comes to the big name players in that respect.

If you’ve read my rationale for the name of this site, you’ll know that it quotes zen writer Philip Toshio Sudo and the idea of the “beginner’s mind”, and how you should try to “set aside all knowledge and preconceptions and open your mind to learning as though for the first time”. For me, that means not being too proud to learn a new game from scratch, accepting the fact that I am a complete beginner, and not skipping the basics because I think I know better. So in keeping with this spirit, (and as an attempt to put a little bit of my money where my mouth is) I’m challenging myself to start playing in the HORSE tournaments at Full Tilt by March 1st (co-incidently St David’s Day!). Okay, so I could begin playing them tonight because the buy-ins start at just $5, but why give money away when I don’t have enough experience at the other games. Right now, I’m exactly the type of player that I’d like to be up against if I was a half-decent all-rounder – someone who tries too hard in the hold’em hands in order to compensate for my lack of experience in the other hands. The other rule in this challenge is that before I start playing the HORSE tournaments I want to have at least ten hours of recorded playing time under my belt for each game. Most of that will also be played at Full Tilt too. I’ve studied and played a little bit of Omaha 8 and Stud, but haven’t played Razz or Stud 8 at all. If anyone reading this has any advice (including books, websites, personal experience, etc) then please let me know, because I haven’t found a great deal out there beyond the obvious books. Certainly Super System 2 is going to help me a lot, as well as Ray Zee’s “High-Low-Split Poker”. I’m particularly keen to find some stuff on Razz, otherwise I’m going to have to rely on Phil Hellmuth’s Razz chapter in “Play Poker Like the Pros” and I think we all know that that could end in tears.

Ultimately, I think that those of us who would like to see an end to the strangehold that hold’em has over the poker world at the moment ought to support any kind of mixed game that we can afford (or just play anything other than hold’em) whenever a particular card room offers it, so that these games continue to survive and flourish.

Despite my personal HORSE challenge, that doesn’t mean I can slack off on the limit hold’em though. I’m still heavily engrossed in bridging the gap between my Lee Jones beginner knowledge and the next step – the “Small Stakes” Ed Miller kind of player that I want to be. I’m looking to make a big push up the limits this year and the only way to do that is to play a lot of hands and to play them well. Which brings me to the Dan Harrington quote at the top of the page. While I was checking some stats in Poker Tracker over Christmas, I realised that I’d played far fewer hands than I thought I had. And I mean a lot fewer – something like half of the amount I thought I’d played. I could come up with excuses – too much time messing around in MTTs, my addiction to futile freerolls, or desperately trying to cling to the life I still have away from the game – but it all comes down to not spending enough time playing. At the moment I feel as though my theoretical knowledge has outstripped my experience and I won’t be able to go much further unless I redress the balance significantly.

Then there’s that casino that opened near me last year that I’ve been meaning to join and play at. So it looks like being a busy year, which is great. I can’t wait!

Here’s an amusing (if slightly juvenile) post from RGP from a few days ago. It’s about what happens if you type the following into a chat box while playing online:

“execute command show_players_hole_cards.scr -private -me -p107″

Google Groups : rec.gambling.poker – Hilarious way to put the fish on tilt

The geek in me finds this quite amusing because I know it’s ridiculous, but I can see how less tech-savvy players could potentially freak out big time. Kind of cruel really I suppose. Guaranteed to clear the table in a small stakes cash game too, I should think.

It’s about time I posted my report on the five $1000 freerolls that Virgin Poker ran to celebrate their re-launch last weekend. Those five nights reminded me just how baffling and frustrating and exhilarating tournament poker can be. In a way, I was kind of glad when the five nights were over so I could go back to what I was doing, which was working hard to improve my limit game, but this was an enjoyable little diversion for a few days. It’ll be interesting to see if Virgin can hang on to a lot of the players who came to these tournaments. I saw a lot of different names from one night to the next, and probably about 99% of them were British too. The number of players involved each night varied from 230 to 295, which isn’t too shabby. I was impressed by the fact that each player started with 2000 chips rather than 1500 (or the 800 you get at some places), so I may stick around and play a few more cheap tournaments there.

Things started really well for me in the first freeroll on Thursday. For the first time ever, I got myself into the late stages of a tournament and into a position where I actually felt that I had as good a chance as anyone to win it. It was very rewarding to see evidence of the work I’ve put into learning to play no-limit tournaments paying off. I comfortably managed to survive that tricky first hour which often trips me up; where the lunatics who call all-in bets with bottom pair get weeded out. I managed to stay just ahead of the average stack by mixing up my play and picking my victims carefully. As the bubble approached I began to steal as much as I could if I could get in first – often asking the medium stacks whether or not they wanted to play for all their chips, particularly the ones who were shopping themselves by chatting about how tense things were getting – the prize money for 11th to 20th place was just $10 for heaven’s sake! I got myself as high as 7th place with 31 players remaining. I was pleased that I didn’t need to come from behind in a hand at any point, but I didn’t have anybody get lucky against me either. Only once did I get involved in a race (with my TT against KQs), otherwise I was always ahead when the cards were on their backs. After two and a half hours of play, I eventually finished 20th out of a field of 242, finishing just in the money after some cold cards and bad position ended my night. As I said, this was the best I had ever done in a field of this size and I felt like I’d proved something to myself. It’s fantastic to see your own good play rewarded with solid results (and cash too, even if it’s only $10) so I was really enthusiastic about the next four nights.

In fact, I gave the Friday freeroll a miss, but I was back on Saturday only to go out after getting appalling cards dealt to me for fifty minutes. There wasn’t a lot I could’ve done about this one. There were too many people willing to call with anything for me to try making any moves. Monday was much the same, although I stayed afloat a little bit longer with some very selective aggression against a half-decent table. Eventually I had to push with an ace and lost a race.

But it was Sunday night’s exit that provided the biggest lesson. I’m conscious of not going into too much detail with hand histories, so I’ll try to just stick to the facts with this one. Anyway, I re-raised with 99 from middle position after the player on my right raised to double the big blind. Everyone else folded. The original raiser called. The flop came a beautiful 953 rainbow and I had a great chance to double through and get myself over that “first sixty minutes” hurdle once again. My opponent bet the minimum 150 into an 1100 pot. I called. The turn brought a 3 to give me a full house. Again there was a minimum bet of 150 into what was now a 1400 pot. Once again, I called, sensing a chance to take all her chips. The river brought a K. This time the bet was 450 into a 1700 pot, leaving her just 400 more. Convinced I had this won against an A9, or a K5, I went all-in for my last 1100, knowing that my opponent was pot-committed, only to be called and shown pocket Ks to lose to a bigger full house. Nooooo!

Okay, so it was a two-outer, but I think a big bet from me on fourth street could’ve ended the hand right there – the pot was big enough at that point to justify doing that and the weak bets coming from my opponent meant that I was unlikely to make significantly more than was already in the pot. Of course, the other possible holding from a weak opponent was a big pair and it’s not out of the question that I would’ve had a big bet called on fourth street with two pair (Ks and 3s) against my full house either, which arguably would’ve been a mistake at that point. Essentially, I got caught trying to extract the maximum from a very strong hand. I took a chance and lost, so no complaints. Next time I’m in a similar situation, I’ll be paying less attention to the “ching ching” noises in my head and thinking instead about how much more I can win from the hand and whether I need to end things quickly and decisively with a big bet.

So that was it – the freerolls were over. What started off very promisingly ended as a bit of a disappointment. Still, I was up $10. Now where did I leave my copy of “Small Stakes Hold’em”??

The geeks amongst you may already know about digg.com. In their own words it’s a “technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control” – so now you know.

Anyway, those of us who play poker regularly (particularly online) are accustomed to dealing with the usual “online poker is rigged”, “bots are cheating you” type of post on internet forums. The people who post this stuff get laughed at and/or flamed to a crisp by the cognoscenti, but I was interested to discover this thread on a non-poker site (the aforementioned digg.com) which links to an article that was original published in that hateful rag the Mail On Sunday.

The comments on the thread show that there’s a large amount of ignorance about poker amongst those who are not involved (and even some who are). Here’s a sample:

Interesting/informative read. Makes me glad I never got into it.

There are corrupt people involved in Gambling?!? My word! Innocence is shattered!

I think anyone who plays online poker is just asking to get hosed. The system can be rigged and you’d never know. Gambling in general is a tax on the stupid.

its too bad the author doesn’t mention how the sites are rigged, especially pp and ub.

So that’s us put in our place then!! In fairness, there are some sensible, intelligent comments as well, some of which point out that teams and collusion are a much bigger threat than bots, so it’s not all idiots. The publishers of the original article should get their arses kicked though for actually giving Ray Bonhert more publicity and actually putting a fucking link to his tawdy little piece of cheating software at the bottom of the article!!! Hmm, I wonder if I could complain to the Press Complaints Commission?