There is less than a 0.2% chance of this happening:

Hellmuth does something savvy here. Once he sees Wiggins’ hand he knows that he has, roughly, two outs (plus the fractional outs assigned to running flushes and straights). By offering to run the hand more than twice he is essentially locking up more and more value for himself.

Imagine the extreme. Assuming only two outs, if the hand is run 100 times* Hellmuth will take 98% of the pot and Wiggins 2% (even though Wigs is “only” a six to one dog or something).

The actual outcome of the hand is the result of staggeringly bad luck — all Hellmuth is left with is the 25% he finagled out of Wiggins by running it four times against two”-ish” outs.

* Note: this is impossible as there aren’t enough cards in the deck — but just pretend.

Via Julian — a “phone” that transcribes and translates between languages live:

There’s an “English-only” rule on the big online poker sites in order to stop open collusion. I yelled at some Russians once for breaking the rule and they switched to English: “Why shouldn’t we be allowed to speak? The site should autotranslate everything to a user-specified language.”

Being an effing good idea I had to agree to that — but I still made them speak English. Good idea or no, there was real money on the table.

My main machine is a MacBook running Leopard. Its hard drive is always verging on full, especially since I got the Rebel and have been shooting gigs and gigs of RAW fotos.

A few months ago (shamefully) it started randomly hanging. It’s a testament to my ability to learn to live with pain that I mostly just ignored the problems.

Then it started happening when I was listening to music.

Then it started happening when I was watching films.

Then it started happening in the middle of poker games.

This last was unacceptable. I’ll take a ten second second chunk out during some dumb movie, but a minute-long hang (they were slowly getting worse) during a poker hand that times out and folds after 30 seconds is actually losing me money.

It changed my play a couple of times. I noticed that once a hang started I would usually still have access to my poker client for a while, but in the interests of not timing out I would go all-in and move the game flow logic off my client and onto the server.

This got me to thinking: why did I still have access to the poker software, but nothing else? Usually it lasted until the end of the hand when the history is written to the hard drive.

I realized that basically everything that I lost during these hangs — I usually have iTunes, Safari, and Lightroom open — is constantly accessing the disk, but Full Tilt only did so at the end of a hand. Similarly I could keep editing stuff in VI, but when I ESC-:-w’d I’d lose control.

Which, because I have good tech intuition, reminded me of Mike’s post about Spotlight indexing removable drives.

The solution to my problem turned out to be identical:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

Turn off Spotlight disk indexing! It sux!

The Kahnawake Mohawks are evicting all non-Mohawks from their reserve near Montreal.

This is somewhat controversial because the law they’re using to do it is more or less a racist one, in the sense that it actively denies housing to people based on their race, but as always with aboriginal issues it’s not necessarily that simple.

Prof. of Indigenous Governance Taiaike Alfred at UVic vociferously defends the measure as a cultural bulwark against assimilation, for example.

The Kahnawake are big in the online poker arena, occasionally for all the wrong reasons — they were deeply involved in the Absolute Poker/UltimaBet cheating scandal and last I recall didn’t really resolve the issue satisfactorily. Things are provably not all on the up-and-up amongst the Kahnawake.

That burned up a lot of my goodwill in a situation like this. Billions of dollars flow through online poker sites — billions. The tribe gets a cut of that, and is incredibly wealthy. I’m interested to see how that wealth is distributed and how these evictions impact those to whom it is, or isn’t, distributed.

That said, perhaps it’s not my business.

Some of our readers will find this newsworthy:

Until Sunday Full Tilt is doubling all of their guaranteed prize money pools while leaving buy-ins fixed.

This is an information bet by Full Tilt. By over-funding every tournament they’re seeing if they can step up in the prize money stakes against PokerStars profitably. It’s possible that they’ve mis-priced this and there’ll just be a lot of over-funded, under-manned tournaments floating around (which, itself, should serve to attract players >:)

This is multiplicative with Sunday’s usual guaranteed $1 million. If you’ve been thinking of starting online poker that’s the day to take up (and help shake down) Rush Poker.

One of the principal members of the Full Tilt Poker team is Chris Ferguson, who has a PhD in Computer Science (virtual network algorithms). I suspect they’ve put his talents into play. In Full Tilt’s last monthly software update they introduced Rush Poker, bringing some advanced ideas about efficiency to the game (click through for video demo):

This new poker format is designed to minimize your wait time between hands and keep you in the action. You’ll join a large player pool and face a different table of opponents every hand you play. When you fold your hand, you’ll be rushed to another table for a new hand right away.

To play even faster, use the Quick Fold button to move to a new table for the next hand immediately.

In this variant they’re treating all of the players online as a cloud, forming tables and allowing queued actions so that it’s almost always your turn to play. I bet they get can get some sick scheduling optimizations going — holdem is highly structured and they can measure how long you typically take to make a decision, your network latency, (uh oh — also your stack size, skill level), etc…

If you played four tables of Rush Poker you’d probably be able to approach 100% decision time, thus destroying several old adages of the game: the key to good play is patience; know your opponent; play people, not cards; pay attention to how the table is playing — all rendered invalid or impossible. All that remains: start with good hands!

And this is all, of course, patent pending — the IP biz has come to online poker

Patrik Antonius: “Rush Poker is a grinder’s paradise.”

Daniel Negreanu, Canadian poker wunderkind, once said that the small blind is the worst-played position in holdem. Let’s take a look.

I’ve been re-reading Harrington’s books recently. Here’s a little tactic I picked up that sounds neat. I’m going to explore it statistically and figure out its range of usefulness. I’ve long said that I have a disutility for safety and security, so an upfront warning: This tactic will add useful complexity to your game, and hopefully expectation.

The situation I’m going to discuss is this: Sometimes the action will fold to you in the small blind. This is usually an indication that the table is playing tight, or scared. It often occurs towards the end of tournaments when you have a big stack and the others around you are in survival mode.

Because of the Monty Hall paradox it is more likely than average that the big blind will be holding a defensible hand when this happens. Psychology is deeply involved too: Essentially, the big blind is more likely that average to believe that a small blind raise in this situation is meaningless and so will be more likely to put in the third bet. Similarly the small blind will be disinclined to believe this third bet and might four-bet, etc.

The Monty Hall paradox and the psychological gamesmanship combine to make blind confrontations a fun, dangerous spot. Things can get crazy, fast.

Those of you who’ve played with me know that I like to raise and re-raise a whole fucking lot, so it won’t surprise you to learn that my raise % here is normally pretty high — as close to 100% as the big blind will let me get away with, and effectively 100% once the antes are out.

This strategy is hidden by the unlikeliness of the action folding to the SB, but if I find myself doing it quite a bit — enough to be noticeable, or if the BB is the particularly suspicious type — then I’ll occasionally make a big show of thinking hard and then folding, “damn I play so tight”, etc, etc, and then get back to raising. One of the strange rules of poker is that an occasional fold (which your opponent notices) gives your raises credibility disproportionately to your actual fold % — if you fold once people somehow become more likely to believe your next series of raises.

Let’s make a simplifying assumption that you’re a stone-cold maniac like me and raise 100% of your SB/BB collisions (but do keep the above caveats in mind — vary your play).

Raises in poker have a couple of objectives: Isolating a single player you can then outplay, building a bigger pot for you to win, and capturing the pot uncontested. We generally want the third result here, so let’s look at raise sizes:

Min (2XBB): You put in two bets and the BB already has one in, forced, so you’re laying 3:1 odds if you min. I call with any two cards and position given those odds. Since the bread and butter of blind stealing is, well, stealing this just doesn’t cut it. When you luck out and get a tight, scared, or short player one to your left this can be a cheap way of robbing him blind (heh), but if hopes and dreams were candies and creams we’d all have a Merry Christmas.

Standard (3XBB): You put in three bets, he has to call two, so you’re laying 2:1. With position this is another any-two-reasonable-cards call, but I find lots of players will just release here.

Over (4XBB): You put in four bets, he has to call three, so you’re laying 5:3. Much less attractive, but 4XBB looks suspicious to me and if you do it enough I’ll take any two cards and position and try to outplay you.

Insane (>5XBB): Laying 3:2 or less. I’d give it up quite frequently at this sized raise, but you’re betting 5 blinds to win 1: 20% ROI, and the times that I do wake up with a hand and position I’ll fucking snap you. Are your losses going to overtake your wins? If I re-pop once and you fold after raising 5X do you think I’ll ever quietly go away again?

Keep in mind: Once the table starts anteing up these odds just get better and better for the BB, forcing the SB to put in more and more chips to sour the odds and increasing the risk of the BB crushing you with a well-timed hand. It turns into one of those black swan deals: Small, regular gains can be disastrously offset by catastrophically unlikely losses.

Imagine the extreme: You shove every hand in this situation (assume similar stack sizes). On average you’ll win maybe 40 bets before the BB gets AA, KK, QQ, JJ, or AK and takes everything you have. This also assumes he’s highly a-typical. Shoves make people angry for some reason so if you do it enough some people will call with a weak queen or something to “teach you a lesson”.

So raising: A mixed bag. But what if you just limp — keep the pot nice and small? Let’s say you have a rule that you limp 100% of the time in the SB when it folds to you. There’s a saying in poker that you should never do anything 100% of the time, but that’s self-contradictory and denies the value of camouflage: Let your cards do the changing — they’re good at being random

If the BB raises then you’ve flipped the above probabilities on him, but don’t have position. Call with your playable hands, a bit stronger than you would in the BB, giving more props to high value cards than drawing hands, take advantage of the initiative inherent in the situation, and proceed with caution. Or just fold. This is a complex situation so the analysis ends there.

If the BB checks, as is often the case, you’ve managed to see the flop for 1/2 a bet, getting those 3:1 odds for yourself. Now, no matter what the flop comes, lead out c-bet for 1/2 the pot (or a bit more). The BB didn’t have a good hand to start, probably, because he just checked behind to your limp. Since you and he each miss the flop something like 67% of the time leading out claims the pot for you. Note that I’m not making reference to hand strength because we’re playing the three Ps here: position, pressure, and player.

Occasionally the BB will float here and then, as above, you just have to play it by ear. Generally in float situations I like to check-raise the shit out of weak-looking turn bets (depending on board texture and my read of the villain), but a lot of the time I just give up, especially facing a raise — after the SB you’ve got the button to cheer you up, so why wallow?

Remember with all of these strategies that the opponent has to have demonstrated an ability to fold mid-hand. Against weaker players you just need to hit your hand and then bet for value.

So, with all that set up here’s what I want to analyze: The case where you see the flop for half a bet and then c-bet half the pot (or a bit more). I guesstimate that this situation will cover about 75% of your blind confrontations in a tournament. Anyway, let’s keep things simple: No antes, action goes limp, check, c-bet:

Pot size on flop: 2BB.
Your c-bet: 1BB.
Success rate: 67% (assumes opponent doesn’t continue without hitting).

67% of the time you bet 1BB to win 2BB, 33% of the time you bet 1BB and then are forced to fold. We’ll also assume that you never hit. This isn’t the case, despite appearances, so 33% of the time in that 33% situation (11% total) you’ll actually have a hand — and some portion of those you’ll still lose, etc. I’d guess you’re a little closer to 75% “default win chance” here, but let’s be conservative and just play it blind.

EV = 67% * 2BB – 33% * 1BB = 1BB

So, given all of the above, your expectation for the SB-limp-cbet betting line is 1BB on a total investment of 1.5BB, for a return of — hey! — 67%.

Contrast this with the above raising lines where betting 1.5BB to win 1BB (the min-raise tactic) had significant issues and all of the other lines invested more and more to get basically the same result. Essentially the limp-cbet line works out to a minraise, but gets you more information about the villainous BB’s hand (and, I think, has a far, far, far higher success chance — an opponent who folds to SB minraises is playing exceptionally poorly).

Some questions going forward (because I’m off to watch some WSOP and this is getting long): How often does the BB have to fold here? How much more than 1/2 the pot can you bet before you meaningfully change the expectation? This last is important for things like representing a big hand that could be drawn out on. In that case you can bet like you’re trying to deny odds to the draws, but if that borks your expectation it might just be better to fire at dry flops, which in turn ruins the purity of playing the situation blind

There might be something to be said there for c-betting wet flops, but then you almost have to assume that floats represent the draw — you don’t end up polarizing your opponent’s range enough to get any information from his call. Although he might be assuming you’re blocking for the draw too (and then not raising for whatever reason). Plus, the float bluff to represent the draw might just be an acceptable risk.

Hmmm. Hmmm. Poker logic ties interesting knots. Now I think, on balance, cbetting wet flops makes sense too. I’ll take the cop-out standard correct poker answer: “It depends on the opponent.”

Anyway, my feel for the numbers is that some mix of 3XBB raises, limp-cbets, and the rare fold is optimal. I like to do things like limp if the first card in my hand is red and raise if it’s black — let the cards randomize your play, they’re better at it than you.

Practically you want start with some reasonable mix and then tailor your line to whatever makes the player in the BB give it up to you most often for the smallest investment (but that’s almost tautology).

I haven’t really watched Rounders in years. Not since I got good at poker and not since I took a screenwriting class. Most poker movies really suck, but I just gotta say: Rounders is fantastic, and Matt Damon knows his craft.

The opening sequence, where he describes the game while playing with KGB, is exceptionally well-done — the look on Damon’s face when he gets felted is just perfect. He conveys the gut-wrenching shock exactly, like a case of the dry heaves combined with the worst kind of public humiliation. If good fiction is a mirror this is one I’ve looked into before.

Just realized that I’ve read all those books and seen all those tapes at the start. The “one big bet per hour” rule for pros is spot-on too (online pokergod is two, really fucking stellar is four, and world-class is eight).

The power of filmic illusions is that they trick you into thinking they contain life lessons — all good stories do. A semi-pro player I greatly respect once told me that I should stop fucking around at low limits, take some shit job and do it poorly, and then take a shot at playing for some real cash. Two local pros have independently told me I’m good enough to do the same. With one or two small differences that’s essentially what Damon does in the movie. This shit resonates deep.

One thing some guys do is head up to Whitehorse or Ft. Mac and play on payday — anywhere blue collar and high-paying is apparently a pretty good living. Toronto, Richmond, and Niagara, are the other big Canadian poker towns. Waterloo for online — are there cardrooms there? I played with Greg “FBT” Mueller (the hockey guy turned pro card player) at the Rock. On some podcast he mentioned that $10/$20 at the Rock, when they have it, plays like $100/$200 in Vegas. USD200 per hour for playing cards is a decent living.

Canadians have something of a reputation, like the Scandinavians, for being terrifying opponents. Must be the socialized medicine.

I’m playing in a little double-or-nothing tourney right now (top 50% get twice the buy-in). On PokerStars you get little badges for playing lots of hands. The two little stars on the guys to the left in the picture above are an example, the guy in the middle doesn’t have one, and I’m the bump on the right.

There are some other badges scattered around the table, but those two are key because they’re in the blinds when I’m on the button and in the cut.

Correct strategy in double-or-nothing tournaments is to play very tight — few hands, and little blind defense. Now, because of their badges I can assume that they know that’s the correct way to play (unless they prove otherwise). Essentially I get a free read on them: I can loosen my play slightly and give them a worse go of it.

You can turn the badges off, but lots of people don’t. They like the pride, or supposed terror, they instill. I, on the other hand, am from the Vilnius school of poker:

It reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. Now they will tremble again – at the sound of our silence. The order is: engage the silent drive.

Just a quick note on a play I’ve been seeing a lot heads up.

The flop comes something like QQ7 rainbow and the pot is, eg, 160. Player A bets 222 or some other ridiculous amount (a weird over-bet).

Player B folds because weird over-bets are usually someone trying to get a big hand paid off and that’s a scary board (imagine you hold AJo there and it’s too early for you to have a read on the guy — what hands could he have started with that you can still beat). Player A shows his cards: 52o — a giant bluff!

Play continues until at some point Player A makes a similar bet in a similar situation.

Player B sees the weird bet again. It’s weird enough to ring bells… Had nothing last time… This time Player B shoves!

Only now Player A has it and takes down a huge pot with a monster of a hand.

I won’t lie — I’ve been Player B in this situation a couple of times. The second time it happened I noticed my hand calling without asking my brain first — the muscle memory of the bluff was too strong for me to stop! There’s some kind of anchoring effect that really weird bets have, so showing a bluff after one seems to program Player B to disbelieve similar bets in the future.

Neat stuff. The defense is to see it coming and fold the second time! The second weird bet also tends to be bigger, I suspect because Player A is more confident of his hand and so less concerned about losing chips. Risking 222 early to set someone up for a 444 value bet later is a good deal, because even if you fold or have to show a bluff and lose the 222 Player B is still programmed to lose 444.