I seem to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I’m moving tomorrow, practically none of my things have been packed, I still haven’t written the Hands of the Day for the weekend (which I won’t have time to do on the weekend thanks to the move), I inadvertently promised to keep an eye on a buddy’s store for five hours on Sunday and all I want to do is sleep.

These are the days to avoid playing poker. Playing a few hands while I eat breakfast and check e-mail is part of my morning ritual, and it took all of about three minutes at a couple of 5/10 tables to flush a couple hundred bucks down the drain. Do bad sessions happen? Sure, but you don’t lessen their likelihood when your head is everywhere but the game.

I won’t be playing any more hands today. Too much to do, not enough time to do it. Times like this are when we’re at our most susceptible. Times like this provide reason enough to leave the keyboard for a little and regroup. Nothing wrong with coming up for air once in a while.

I’m guessing my blogging over the next couple of days will be brief, for which I apologise, but it won’t be a lasting trend. Come monday, I’ll be done unpacking, waking up to a new room with a new view in my new apartment, and that kind of environmental shift has to provide fuel for the creative engine. Until then, I’m sure I’ll get in a few sweaty comments and back-ache links. Have a good weekend,

Gary
gary@wisehandpoker.com

As I was writing up the two World Series deciding hands that made ten-two ‘The Brunson’ today, I had to stop for a moment and just appreciate how lucky I am.

Since we started this operation on June first, I’ve more or less ate, drank and slept poker. Whether I’m playing it, reading about it or writing it, a good twelve to fourteen hours of my average day is dedicated to poker now, and while the game has always been called ‘A hard way to make an easy living’, it’s been a lot of fun.

Games have always been a major part of my life. My parents were gamers, their parents were gamers and I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve always been supported in my serious pursuit of games even before poker became vogue. That I discovered the poker world a decade ago, that it’s exploded around me…these are good things. Some times you go out looking for the four leaf clover; some times, it just falls in your hand.

Poker could be more than a passing fad. This is, after all, an activity whose popularity has grown consistently for over a century and a half. It transcends cultural and lingual barriers; any table you sit at mixes men, women, the young, the old, Caucasians, east- west- and south-Asian, Black… poker is very quickly becoming an international language, right up there beside love, war and money.

Of course, poker really IS love, war and money. You chat with someone at your table, all the while plotting to take his or her bankroll. We complain to one another about our bad beats, knowing that through mutual experience, the patient listener is going to understand, all the while listening for weakness for later exploitation. Everyone’s your ally, everyone’s your enemy, and in the end, no matter who you are, it’s you against the world.

The poker world is many things: Social gathering, battle field, haven. With the online community exploding the way it has, its now a constant companion at work and at play. For some reason, this one activity has appealed to all of us. Instead of something we can all watch, like a sporting event or movie, this is something we call all do, and can keep on doing for a long, long time.

Lucky we figured it out when we did.

Gary
gary@wisehandpoker.com

In researching today’s Hand, I did a lot of reading about Daniel Negreanu’s challenge matches click here. It’s worth a read

Hang out with enough poker players and you’re bound to hear it over and over again: “Play the player”. Its a simple statement with complex message that men have devoted entire volumes to writing about. If you want a book that will explain in detail what it means, I’d suggest picking up Mike Caro’s Book of Tells or Super System II, which Caro contributed a chapter to.

While looking for inconsistencies in each player’s actions is a big part of this equation, that which is less recognized is playing on the traits of your opponent. I’ll give you an example:

I have a group of friends with who I’ll get together and play some relatively low-stake, short stack NL tourneys, usually getting in four or five tournaments in a night. Recently, we had a get together where a stranger was introduced to the group. He was meticulously dressed, not a wrinkle or misplaced hair in sight. He stiffly shook our hands and we sat to play.

I handed out the chips, and within five minutes, I noticed his stack had been color co-ordinated. Not red chips and white chips, mind you, but the stripes in each column had been lined up, the chips stacked perfectly in a patterned order of two white, one red. This was a man for whom there must be an order to things. This guy was compulsive to an anal degree.

Noting this, I started watching him more closely, and it became apparent he was betting made hands, checking draws and never, ever bluffed. It didn’t take too long to catch the pattern, because it was the player and not the play that tipped me off. Each of us has a unique and precise personality, and that personality, under natural circumstances, is going to be reflected in our play. I won the first tournament by bluffing the compulsive out of two big pots then folding my pocket sevens pre-flop to his big raise (he showed kings).

When I say natural circumstances, I mean under conditions where the player in question hasn’t gone out of their way to rectify their habit. To use myself as an example, I’m not an entirely trusting guy, and for a long time, the result of that was my calling down too many hands because of my being conditioned to believe the worst was always possible. Over the years, this is a problem which, when unattended to, has repeatedly crept upon me, and is usually responsible for my bad stretches. Fortunately for me, I’ve spotted the problem, which usually means I can adjust as a solution.

The next time you sit down at the table with people you know, think about who you’re playing against. Do it with their personality in mind, because the traits they try so hard to hide at the poker table will be more readily available to you. Likewise, know yourself: Find your weaknesses as a person and you can clean them up in your game.

Gary Wise
Gary@wisehandpoker.com

Poker’s history differs from those of others’ in that the organized game hasn’t completely consumed the cash game. In the era of professional sports, no player-niche has managed to keep its status of its professional league. Yes, Muhammad Ali, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods became brands whose cultural importance at least rivalled their respective games, but never has a group of players done so as in poker.

Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Johnny Chan, Phil Ivey, Barry Greenstein, Jennifer Harman, Chau Giang and most recently Daniel Negreanu are the core of the $4000/$8000 blind rotating poker game that’s gone virtually unstopped for years in Vegas. Before the WPT was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, these people were playing for pots as big as many WSOP purses. Brunson used to note that most tournaments weren’t worth the time because the potential dividends weren’t as profitable as his daily play.

Times have changed. Brunson won a WPT this year joining many of his everyday opponents in that claim, and the group has continued to dominate WSOP play, with Negreanu taking Player of the Year honors in 2004, Doyle, Ivey and Greenstein* winning bracelets this year and the rest owning multiples. It’s an elite group, and while some (Negreanu, Ivey) embraced the tournament format quickly, the rest took a while to come around.

Now, they’ve become an integrated part of the landscape, a priveledge to have attend one of your tournaments. No group has ever had this kind of status in the context of their games. For them, the tournament money is almost trivial, and that makes them the gods of the felt. The restired gunslingers. The exalted few.

The players who’ve climbed the moutainous poker community and have all the money in the world for it. It’s as if a collection of Gretzky’s and Jordan’s played at their peak level in a private game for the best of the best. Once in a while they invite a Charles Barkley-type into the game and take his money. It hasn’t been openly discussed much in these terms, but the bridging of the rest of the community to these players is going to be a major theme in poker television for the next few years because their presence guarantees legitimacy. They’re legends who are just now being exposed to the naked consumer: They’re a breed we may never see the likes of again

* - Greenstein can afford to give his tournament winnings to charity because of his ring game success.

I just finished reviewing the Poker Superstars season one championship, and its just as shocking as the first time to watch Gus Hansen handle the big game like Pitt and Clooney did the young Hollywood types in Oceans 11. The onus of the entire show seems to be on Gus’ style contradicting those of those older, wiser, more accomplished titans he outmaneuvered one by one, and well it should be: the man played brilliantly and got paid off for his trouble.

Gus’ name is given most commonly as the answer to “Who is your favorite WPT player?”, which is hardly surprising, as only Daniel Negreanu’s season three rush has matched Hansen’s success on the Tour. His more involved style makes for better television than the more traditional fold five-times-out-of-six style of play, and by bucking this trend, he bucks the trend: He wins. He’s well spoken, handsome in an unconventional way, wears his thoughts on his face…along with Negreanu, he’s about as good as its going to get where the TV execs are concerned.

The player in me may actually appreciate Gus more than the observer, which is a tall order. Gus has tought against type, preaching through action against the more tried and true paths to success, and his fans have become his emulators. Why wait for Phil Hellmuth’s big ten (AA, KK, QQ, JJ, TT, 99, 88, 77, AK, AQ) when you can be like Gus? 84o? That’s a call. J2s? That’s a raise. I think Gus has inadvertently provided a lot of meals for those beating up on his decipals, who don’t really understand that what he does expands beyond the context of the hand he’s playing in.

When you see Gus taking those long pauses at the table, he’s not only considering what’s going on in the hand being played, but what those opponents have done in similar situations in the past and what they’ve seen him do not only against them but against other players. That Gus is a math genius doesn’t hurt. That he mixes that with an uncanny understanding of the human condition doesn’t either.

In Superstars, the key to Gus’s success was that he got the big boys believing they ‘had to keep him honest’, and they called when he had them beat. Did he get some lucky cards? Absoluitely. His ATdd knocking out Barry Greenstein’s AQo (all in on the preflop) was tremendously lucky, but he was able to use that situation to convince everyone they needed to call his maverick raises. He then turned over a couple of winners and had the opposition crossed up, betting Phil Ivey out of a winner and getting TJ to call his monster. Sure, the deck hit him in the face: But he made those hits count in future hands until there were no more future hands.

The point of all this? Well, two things really: One, Gus is a rare and special player who should be watched and appreciated and celebrated, because his is a talent that won’t come along very often and excellence deserves attention. Two, unless you’re Will Hunting, chris Ferguson or Gus, you probably don’t have the math or memory to do what Gus does, which likely makes it foolish to try. If you’re new to the game, stick with the Hellmuth method. If we could all be Gus, he wouldn’t be ‘Gus’.

I was doing some reading last night about assorted pro personalities when I came across a debate about TonyG, the Lithuanian born, Australian0residing mouth of the deepest south. If you haven

They say you should never play to get even, but I have to say, I don’t know that there’s a better feeling than accomplishing that task. The idea is that you won’t be playing optimally with that specific goal in mind, that you should be playing the same fundamentals whether you’re winning or losing, which makes a lot of sense. Further, once you actually achieve that goal, you’re bound to break down a little because the achievement sates you. You shouldn’t ever be able to win enough: You should always want to win more.

Playing three PartyPoker.com 5/10 games, I started out nicely, winning a few early hands, but then lost three pots in ten minutes where my pocket pair was beaten by an opposing pocket pair hitting their trips on the turn or river, and suddenly I was deep in the hole. Thing is, I was playing pretty well, and I knew as much, so I bore down with that dreaded ‘get even’ demon peering over my shoulder, careful not to alter the way I was playing. Seeing 19% of the flops*, I focused on tight-but-aggressive play, and my Win % of flops seen finally rose from the early 26% to 43%, helping me finish the session up a few hundred bucks.

One trick I try to use in a situation like this one is to set the ‘breaking even’ bar a little higher. In the professional world, if you spent three hours making no money, you wouldn’t consider it a successful day on the job, and I think the same goes for poker. I usually enter a session trying to make some $40-$50 per hour (multiple tables makes this far more plausible, with the sheer volume of hands making your earnings-per-hand reasonable), so that bar of satisfaction is set high enough that at least I’m not sated until it’s a good day. We can tell ourselves to ignore break even point all we want, but subconciously, it’s still going to be there nagging. This way, at least I fool my inner demons into thinking they haven’t achieved all they need to when I hit $0 for the session.

While playing, I had Phil Hellmuth’s Million Dollar Online Poker Secrets playing in the background. While I’ve played and read enough to know the things he was talking about, I found his expression of the basics to be very effective. He explained everything well, personalized the whole deal with some accounts of his own online experiences and gave what I think it a pretty solid set of system paramenters for starting online poker players to abide by. If you’re still new to this whole phenomenon, you could do far worse than this as your starting point

* On Party, when you’re at the table, you can right click on your name to see your statistics for the session. Be careful of the ‘Showdowns won’ stat: It doesn’t count hands where you make it past the river, your opponent shows the winner and you muck, artificially inflating your percentage)

If you aren’t familliar with Bit Torrent, its the latest in shareware technology and a handy way to catch any TV shows you missed. For those of us not fortunate enough to be recieving ESPN’s broadcasts of the 05 WSOP, for example, its a damn important piece of software, and without it, I’d still be wondering if Raymer could take down the ‘04 title.

Amongst my morning Internet meanderings is a stop at a few of the more popular torrent sites (www.torrentspy.com, www.isohunt.com, wwww.piratebay.com) to see if typing the keyword ‘poker’ brings up anything new. Yesterday, I found myself a gem: a recording of a $10/$20 no limit cash game in which one player sat down with around twenty grand and started pushing all-in on every second hand or so. For the guys at the table, it was an unexpected windfall, or at least, it was until they realized the gravity of every situation they faced.

Think about this: You’ve spent months building your online roll when this guy sits down at your table, and while losing the $5k you had in play is a hit you can take, you didn’t expect that possibility on every hand. This guy automatically starts shoving his stack in, and you get a hand where you know you’ll be a 70% favorite, but inherent in that advantage is a 30% risk that you’re about to lose your shirt. Its a lot of pressure to be faced with.

Now, the obvious gambler response is ‘you have to get your money in when the money is good’, but a lot of those players can’t be so flippant about losing that $5k or whatever they have in play. One guy who had $8K in play went all in with TT and lost to the big man’s J9o when a Jack hit the turn. He rebought for two grand, which has me thinking he lost a good piece of his roll right there. Its scary to play any game where the cards can drown you.

I’ve seen a few stretches of play like this before. Those I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing have usually been at the hands of young, very rich guys looking to blow off some steam. On one such occasion, the player instructed the dealer to keep raising on his behalf while he went to the bathroom. For them, its about the adrenaline of the thing, which means you’re going to win in the long run. Just be careful of the short run: you might find yourself digging a hole you can’t get out of.

Phil Gordon wrote an article that offers a lot of sound philisophical advice for clean living and playing with the help of an old friend:

click here

A few additional notes on some of the virtues mentioned:

Temperence: While Phil’s point about drinking is well taken, it applies to diet as well. Eating heavy foods or just too much can dull the senses, while eating nothing at all won’t prepare you for the long haul of a tournament. Try to find a happy, healthy medium.

Order: Order in poker should go beyond the table. Keep track of your progress in a notebok or computer file. The patterns that emerge will help you pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses and adjust accordingly.

Sincerity: To quote Phil, “A lot of money is passed among poker players. If you’re a borrower, be truthful when you say you’re going to pay the money back. If you’re asked by a friend for advice on a hand, answer truthfully — you may need similar help down the road.”. This lends to team-based think tank approach I’ve advocated. If you don’t operate in good faith with those you go to war with, you’re going to war against them and you’ll lose them not only as a source of strength, but friendship.

Justice: The summary here is this: Don’t be a dick. It may cost you tonight, but if it keeps the weak player coming back for the next five years, its going to benefit you over the long haul.

Tranquitlity: A friend of mine Ben Stark once advised me to assume every play I make is the correct one. While some won’t work out or look right in hindsight, if there’s a logic to what you do, it could be correct, and the confidence that will result will be beneficial. If you kill yourself over every misplay, you’ll be miserable, and that’s not the mindset you want to be sitting with.