Sympathy for Myself

I’ve never understood all the fuss
About my disguises
The word now carries a sense of deceit
But the fake fur and eyelashes
Came from a sense of fun
The same with the clues
Muddle metaphysicians
And find mystics in a heap
A wizard who lives backwards
And doesn’t sleep?
Invert nil REM
It’s easy
Mallory got that one anachronistically
Give him a hint and he’ll create a novel
And thus a world

Ours is dying
We’re promised a technological cure
And told that the medicine
Is a dose of Vitamin C and not clap sans frontieres
Similar promises accompanied pox-filled blankets
Terra Incognita became terror known
To those who saw the New World as old
Age provides perspective.
Four hundred years for Rome
Less here I think.
Caligula may have looked impassively at the decapitated head of his nephew
(Will that child not stop coughing?)
But he would blush today.

According to an ex-colleague of mine
It was people who screwed up the deal from the get-go.
He forgets that I was there and saw
Eve's alleged mistake
She wanted to exile ignorance.
But the snake
(When straight, the perpendicular pronoun, wink wink)
Was a liberator
A facilitator of education.
The one thing that He despises most.
Knowledge is the antithesis of faith.
And what’s the price for suppressing it?
Hope and Charity locked out of the house.
Silly girls asked questions.
Original thought is original sin

So with snakes out of favor it was time for geometry
Got Descartes thinking
Produced axes and soon thereafter
Died in Sweden thanks to the negligence of Queen Christina
(There's that name again, feminized)
He says, 'thou shalt not know,' and strikes down one of the Enlightened.
But the first half of the secret slipped out.
I think, therefore I am.
A good start
And yet the species is reluctant to end its childhood
And accept that the Cartesian axiom for an individual also applies to a society, planetwide.

He’s the master of confusion
His lawyers successfully turned the World upside down.
War, they claim, is the domain of the Dark Angel, for our Lord is Light
(Blitzkrieg almost gave the game away, but they got the Big Lie guy on board)
The Lightning strike of the Stukas was His idea, not mine.
The Crusades didn’t end.
The theocratic clash echoes down the centuries and Force Majeure still rules
But knightly armor is now Armani and an alligator smile.

Funny thing.
We’re told, by the latest lead attorney
As he stuffs his old clothes in the closet
And puts on a funny hat
That the one without toes is behind all this
(The only inconvenience concerning the toes, incidentally, being a slight numbness in the feet, but an aspirin a day works wonders)
I’ve also been implicated in famine
But have you once heard me say ‘go forth and multiply.’
No. That was one of His.
And don’t worry about the consequences for He will provide… Starvation?
And if all this gets you down remember
Death ain’t so bad.
Heaven on Earth is a blink away.

But a cat has two eyelids, blinks twice.
The second one a Darwinian marvel evolved to block His Light.
It’s why felines need nine lives
They’ve used those eyes to peek behind the curtain and so He keeps trying to bump them off.
Exterminated by the Inquisition in millions.
Know why?
The cats were killing the rats.
Slowed the spread of the Black Death.
He got pissed.
Plague fills the churches faster than plenty.
Fear populates the pews.

I'll give Him this, He has a certain ingenuity.
But even He can’t suppress the curiosity characteristic of cats and sometimes seen in people.
He’d like to because you are (He claims) His children.
(Technically adopted; He bends the truth.)
He tried to head-off the desire for knowledge through his Killing Joke
Claiming the Son was a teacher
Teacher? A teacher of blind obedience.
Follow me for I am the path and through me, The One
(The cats call him the One Third)
You will learn not to think.
Here endeth the lesson.
Well, with the Father's pitiful bill of goods, what other lesson could there be?
The three of them, you see, they don't want to let you go.
They like having kids, whereas I’ve never been comfortable around children.
That's why they threw me out.
And why, eventually
(I have to confess, it's taking a while)
I will bring Childhood's End.

The Interwebz

One of the problems presented by online poker that is not an issue when playing live is losing internet connection to the poker site. If a casino unexpectedly bursts into flames all players in the card room are affected equally and an equitable resolution to the problem can be easily found. I guess it's conceivable that one of the geriatric cocktail waitresses at Bally's might drop a gin and tonic in my lap and that I'd be forced to leave, but that has not yet happened. If, on the other hand, I am sitting in a PLO8 tourney at Stars looking with joy at AA23 single-suited and my internet goes down I am both screwed and apoplectic. This happened last night. For real. AA23.

As we all know, the internet is a series of tubes, and I understand that on occasion those tubes can get clogged. So when I phoned my cable company this afternoon to report this ongoing problem I was polite and controlled despite the fact that this is costing me money!!! And I spoke to a very helpful young man named Brandon who confirmed he was seeing packets vanishing for an unknown reason and that a service engineer would be out tomorrow afternoon. Which is really pretty fucking useless given that I need to play off another 1400 Stars' VPPs to maintain my VIP status AND I am supposed to be internet-broadcasting a tournament tonight. Brandon also told me explicitly, because I asked, that no other customer in my area had reported any problems.

Now I know absolutely nothing about the internet (other than the tube thing), hardware, software, computers, electronics, or anything that gets plugged into a wall socket, but undeterred by my boundless ignorance I decided to walk around my estate to see if there were any squirrel teeth marks in the big wire that comes from a pole in the alley to the box on the side of my house. And what did I see in the alley? I saw a man up a ladder fiddling with wires. And beneath him was a white van. And what do you think was written on the side of the van? Hmmm??? Yup. The name of the cable company that provides my fucking internet.

Just Play

National Poker Week is upon us and a drive is underway by organizations such as the Poker Players Alliance to defend The Holy Game from the stupidity of the UIGEA, the DoJ and quite probably the DMV since they are usually involved in making life difficult. This raises a question for professional and recreational online players alike: What can we do to keep online poker legal and help it thrive?

There are petitions that can be signed and form letters that require a couple of mouse clicks to send to members of the House and Senate. The major online sites have been ponying up prize-pools for freeroll tournaments for those signing these petitions and sending letters, thereby providing additional incentive for players to get involved in this process. I strongly encourage everyone who supports the right of citizens and residents of the U.S. to play online poker to take the thirty seconds required to petition and write. However, I am also convinced that the most important weapon we have in our fight against dim, repressive, and flawed legislation is the simplest of all.

Just play.

The fundamental reason that the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. was repealed is that people continued to manufacture and consume alcohol. Similarly tobacco remains legal despite its health consequences because so many people smoke. The U.S. will eventually follow the worldwide trend of decriminalizing marijuana largely for the same reasons. One does not have to approve of drinking and smoking to recognize that attempts to make them illegal are counter-productive and lead to a lessening of respect by the public of laws in general.

Playing poker online is not currently illegal, of course. Part of the cynicism of lawmakers opposed to online poker is that, recognizing the popularity of the game, they have attempted to cripple it through indirect means such as attacking the flow of money between players and online sites. And this has clearly succeeded in driving away many U.S. players. Particularly the bad ones, unfortunately. We have endured scares over seized funds going back to the Neteller fiasco. I had nearly $10k tied up for several months. I didn't like this at all. Eventually every penny ended up safely in my bank account.

Clearly one can make the decision to cease playing and wait to see how the legal situation pans out. That is exactly what the opponents of our freedom to play The Holy Game want you to do. So be the change you want to see in the world. Just play.

Department of "Justice"

As an Omaha-8 player my life is not exactly stress-free. At least once a day I will flop the nut flush and nut low, lose the low on the turn to a counterfeit, and watch the flush dissolve on the river as the board pairs. I also have to maintain concentration over many hours while sitting at tables with players who have screen-names such as "ilovetoeatpoo." But this is the life that I have chosen and all I really ask is that I be left alone to make my living playing poker.

Apparently in the "land of the free" this is overly optimistic.

It has emerged over the last couple of days that the Department of Justice, acting through the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has frozen $30 million of online poker players' winnings.

Why?

Apparently it has something to do with the 1961 Wire Fraud Act. My detailed research has revealed that whenever some social-engineering, mindless, bottom-dwelling federal attorney decides they want to make a name for themselves without bothering with the niceties of due process they invoke wire fraud. Which they are compelled to do in the case of online poker because playing poker is not illegal.

In fact why online poker gets certain politicians all riled up baffles me. "Gambling is a disease. It destroys families." I see. Well, first poker is a game of skill it isn't "gambling," and second where are these nanny-state legislators when it comes to state lotteries?

I went to my local gas station the other day to buy a carton of cigarettes. For the reasons given above I, like many Omaha-8 players, smoke heavily. The check-out guy asked me if I wanted to buy a lottery ticket. I peered at him over my shades with my best "wtf do you think" glare. "Sorry," he replied, "we have to ask everyone that this week."

Walking home I mulled this over. The corporation running this gas station instructs its employees to invite customers to engage in gambling. Since the lottery is state run it follows that they do so with the full support of the state. This is essentially solicitation to participate in gambling of a form that would be illegal in any Nevada casino because the house take is so huge. But if I choose to play poker online and by using my skill advantage win money I run the risk of losing my winnings because of "wire fraud."

Genuinely confused by all this I decided it was time to do a little background research into the man apparently behind this madness, Arlo Devlin-Brown, the assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. It seems online poker is the bee in the bonnet of Mr. Devlin-Brown since it was he who went after Neteller and Party Poker for reasons that are baffling to poker players.

Based on my extensive research it is possible that Mr. Devlin-Brown has spent much of his legal career involved in noble causes protecting the innocent and acting as an advocate for the disenfranchised. And that while engaged in these activities he has shunned publicity. Because a thorough googling of Mr. Devlin-Brown returns a remarkably thin curriculum vitae up until the point he got in on this wire fraud scam. Specifically since 1995, when Mr. Devlin-Brown placed 4th in the APDA Speaker of the Year contest, his only notable achievement was the prosecution of a Mount Vernon trash hauler:

Albert Tranquillo III, 30, of Armonk, faces a possible new indictment that will include a charge of bribing a Mount Vernon Department of Public Works official.

"There is a substantial likelihood a superseding indictment will be handed down," Assistant U.S. Attorney Arlo Devlin-Brown said during Tranquillo's hearing before U.S. District Judge Stephen C. Robinson.

Appparently this case was insufficient to catapult Mr. Devlin-Brown into the spotlight and he is looking for bigger fish to fry. Thereby chasing all my fish off the poker sites and back to the state lotteries.

It's WSOP time and I'm in... Kansas?

And I'm not at all happy about it. For the first time since 2004 I'm not in Vegas for the World Series of Poker. My personal recession and the indifference of the Government to my request for a financial bail-out have stranded me in the Heartland when I should be prowling the side action at The Mirage and Caesar's Palace.

So instead of the real deal I am at home playing the "Mini Series of Poker" courtesy of the good folks at Full Tilt. It's great! The events are the same as the WSOP but the buy-ins are 1/100th the size. This naturally means the prizes are somewhat reduced, so despite cutting through a field of 1500 to finish 77th in the LO8 my prize was a mere $36. $20 net. $10 after I split the profit with my backers.

I blew all my winnings on a modest lunch the next day and then got back to work playing the PokerStars 100k Nightly where I busted when someone accidentally called my AQ shove with K3. Flop A3x turn 3. Busted by a misclick. I immediately fired off an e-mail to Stars' support urging them to introduce REALLY HUGE ACTION BUTTONS.

Even though I'm not going to be out for the show I will be following the fortunes of several friends who'll be playing. Good luck today, Marky, in the PLO. And many congrats to Connie/sunfish2 for winning a Main Event seat through a Full Tilt satty. Connie helped me turn my LHE game from a firework display into solid poker. Like many pros over the last couple of years she's been under considerable financial stress so to see her have this big score really made me happy. It was also the best tournament poker I've ever seen her play.

It was 20 years ago last Monday...

...that I flew from London, the city of my birth, to Baltimore. I had two suitcases, $600 and a freshly-minted PhD in Theoretical Cosmology. The European Space Agency had very kindly given me a postdoctoral fellowship to work at the Space Telescope Science Institute. My plan was simple. Spend three years in the U.S. building my academic credentials then get back to London to resume normal life.

My plans often get derailed. Instead of moving back to London after my fellowship was completed I moved to Toronto for two years during which time the town experienced five winters. In my opinion it's the ugliest city in North America. And I have visited Detroit, Cleveland, and Akron.

For the last fifteen years I have lived in Kansas. I'm not sure why. I moved here because my second wife had a job at the University of Kansas, but she left the state a decade ago. I am fond of thunderstorms, but that seems a fairly thin reason to live in the middle of nowhere. Its main geographical advantage in the U.S. is that it's half way to everywhere else.

About three years ago I developed another plan of moving to Vegas. It's the obvious city for me to live. People go there with the idea that they have money to "spend" on gaming. It's always a joy to my ears when I'm sitting at McCarran airport on the way home and hear people explain that they are down a few hundred on the trip but "where else can you have that many hours of fun for $600?" If only all of them played poker.

Which brings me to my idea for the perfect casino. The poker room at most casinos tends to be located fairly centrally. This is because for the most part casinos don't like poker players. We take up a lot of space, the games require dealers and floor (managers - all parts of the casino require a physical floor with the possible exception of the area around Keno where falling to one's death may be better than playing the game) who have to be paid, and the drop from the game is relatively small. By putting the card room in a central location it makes it less likely punters walking through the casino "trying their luck" at slots and table games will stumble across it inadvertently and compound the problem of the poker presence. Perhaps counter-intuitively the outer parts of the casino act as an area of distraction.

The flipside to this is that I can readily find the poker room in a casino that I haven't previously visited, so my plan is to leave the current location alone. However, it is of some importance that those compassionate tourists who are happy to spend a few hundred on losing are encouraged to find the poker room.

I envision the following scheme. At each casino entrance, as well as the region by the guest elevators, boring slot machines should be placed. These form the beginning of slot-lined walkways all of which lead like spokes to the poker room. Moving around the casino floor towards table games will be rendered difficult by this arrangement, thereby discouraging people from getting involved with blackjack and roulette. As one progresses up the walkways the slot machines will become more interesting. Shit doesn't run uphill and neither does money so this is necessary in order to funnel people towards the poker room. Drinks will also improve as one moves along the walkways. The more attractive cocktail waitresses will be positioned at the poker room end. Small pies and candy will start to appear as one gets closer to the convergence of the spokes.

You may object to this plan on the grounds that the increasing quality of slot machines and perks may cause people to stall out before reaching the poker room. There are a couple of things to understand here. First, one can classify visitors to casinos into two groups: those who are happy to sit in front of slot machines like automatons for sixteen hours at a time surviving only on candy, small pies, and watered down drinks, and those who get bored of slots and investigate table games. I regard the dedicated slot players as individuals who are beyond the reach of poker (and probably beyond hope of any kind). Consequently my plan only applies to the second category of people and even the dimmest have figured out that candy, small pies and watered down drinks are portable.

In this way people will tend to find themselves in front of the poker room. Currently most poker rooms appear a little unfriendly from the outside. They tend to be designed for people who know ahead of time that they want to play poker and who have some idea of the processes involved in signing up for a game. In addition to making that process more user-friendly, possibly employing more complementary small pies, I envision a large sign being placed at the front of the poker room that reads "Poker! It's Great Fun! Come In And Try Your Luck!" (It's important to give the impression to recreational players that poker is mainly luck. That way they feel better about themselves when they lose.)

There is one further element to my plan. Every poker room will spread limit Omaha high-low, $5/10 with a full-kill. The table will be placed near an exit so I don't have far to go for smoke breaks. And whenever I visit a particular card room all other pros will be asked to leave. They won't object. This plan will make them a fortune.

So why have I not moved to Vegas? I think it's clear from the above that I have the right sort of mind for the place. There are two reasons.

First, I have a Maine Coon cat, Zoot. He is sixteen and has been with me longer than my two ex-wives put together. (Incidentally, the possibility of combining my two ex-wives into a single super-being may have interesting military implications, but I will return to that idea in a later blog.) I simply can't put Zoot through the trauma of moving.

Second, despite my constant mention of what a great place Vegas is to live particularly for individuals working in the general area of mental health, my psychotherapist shows no interest in moving there. I really have enough problems as it is without going through the grueling process of finding someone else to help me solve my problems. Besides I'd miss her.

Poker isn't about winning and losing (Part I)

...it's about making the right decisions. Also sprach Doyle Brunson and given my current ROI I'm not going to argue with him.

In some ways the idea is self-evident. We play poker with the long-term goal of winning, but the way we actually get there is by making correct decisions. And extrapolating the concept we can reasonably conclude that the most successful poker players are the ones who make the most correct (either the largest number of correct or the 'correctest') decisions.

I'd like to apologize for my pedantic and stilted prose today. This afternoon I spent 45 minutes talking to my insurance agent.

So how do I become a better poker player? How do I make more correct decisions?

I suspect if you asked poker players why someone like Chris Ferguson or Jen Harman is so good at the game the answers would include experience, knowing the odds, hand-reading ability...

I don't need to 'suspect' anything, I will go and post this very question at a poker forum. BRB.

Okay, it'll take a while to get responses so I'll just keep yammering on here and get back to that later. Irrespective of the answers I receive I think it's apparent that the Holy Grail which we seek is an explanation of why some poker players make better decisions than others. And equally clearly a large part of the answer is "they know more about the game than the poor saps who couldn't tell you the odds of hitting a flush draw with two to come if you gave them a bit of paper that listed the odds of hitting a flush draw with two to come."

So is that it?

I don't think so.

In fact I'm becoming increasingly convinced that what separates great poker players from good ones and good ones from donkeys isn't the depth of knowledge of the game at all. It's the ability to consistently make the decision that the player knows to be correct. This idea may sound silly, but so does setting fire to a leaf and inhaling the fumes. As a cigarette smoker of 30 years I guess I am well-placed to entertain the plausibility of silly ideas.

In any tournament or cash game the players will have differing levels of understanding of the fundamentals of poker, but in my experience these differences are not great. I used to play a lot of limit hold 'em around the $25/50 limits where essentially everyone knew the odds and the standard plays. The vast majority of players had decent hand-reading skills and knew situations where it was profitable to run a bluff or make a loose call to pick off a likely bluff. And yet some players were consistent winners while others financed my drinking problem.

Why?

The simple answer is the losing players were making all the classic poker mistakes. Playing too many hands, going too far with hands, chasing draws without the correct odds, and so on. And they made these plays despite 'knowing' that they were clear mistakes.

So why would anyone do such a thing? It may sound sufficiently unlikely that you are currently wondering if I am fabricating the whole thing as part of some cunning plan to make a joke about beavers. Well I'm not. Honest. In fact about thirty minutes ago I made exactly such a play myself. One of me watched in horror as another one of me clicked the "call" button. When I failed to hit the draw that I had no business chasing the one of me that was operating my eyes blinked at the screen. All of me then closed PokerStars and came here.

At this point one of you may be elbowing another of you in the ribs saying "oh, he's going to talk about tilt, we know all about that let's eat ice-cream." NOT SO FAST! Simply giving a name to a phenomenon doesn't explain anything. I want to pull this puppy apart and examine its intestines. Besides 'tilt' implies a deviation from a norm. Poker players making sub-optimal decisions even when they know better is the norm.

Let's play with some working hypotheses. Presumably when we make a poker decision that we know to be incorrect there is a reason. In the most general terms, there must be something about the incorrect decision that appeals to us. After all, the one of us who balances the check book at the end of the month is a pretty assertive character, so the one of us who is determined to make bad decisions must have a strong motivation to do so and have the ability to overcome the wishes of the check-book balancer.

Who is this bastard who keeps destroying my bankroll?

Since we've exonerated the mathematical, rational, logical me, it must be one of those characters who is frequently at a loss to explain himself. Possibly the one who will start crying at the sight of a Monet, or become unaccountably furious when examining the shape of a paper clip. We may never unambiguously identify him, but it seems that he has been spending far too much time hanging out with my unconscious. And that in itself produces something of a paradox because the unconscious knows a great deal about poker and could be a major asset if it wasn't for this business of whispering in the ear of the me that has the responsibility of clicking the "call" button.

In fact it's far more important than that. Because another thing the unconscious knows about is the unconscious of other poker players. And if we could get it to spill the beans we'd have the ultimate poker edge.

In Part II of these musings I'll suggest that the vast majority of the beans are still in the bean jar but that one or two have escaped. More accurately, one of me will suggest that.