The pitfalls of live poker

With just 24 hours to go before I find myself seated at the Las Vegas Team Challenge III tournament in Birmingham, I feel I should start preparing myself for the big day.

Whether poker can be considered a sport is debatable, but it’s fair to say I won’t be partaking in any of the special preparations that are required of most athletes.

No stretching, no muscle relaxation and certainly no waking up at the crack of dawn to go for a jog after a morning breakfast of two raw eggs. Bleurgh.

Instead, I must come up with a preparation plan for the unique problems any poker player faces when entering a live tournament.

Boredom

Poker is boring. There, I said it. Sitting in one place, folding hand after hand, waiting for something decent can be outrageously dull. More so when you’re playing live and you can’t have multiple online tables open to keep you occupied.

The first day of this tournament is approximately 9 hours of play, with a few breaks. That’s a lot of pots where I won’t be involved. Preventing boredom is one of the key skills of getting better at poker. The more bored you become, the more likely you are to play poor cards at the wrong time just to get some action.

Even professional poker players like Phil Laak can get bored.

Legitimate response: Use the time to study other players when you’re not in the hand. Who’s raising a lot? Who can be bullied out of hands? Every piece of information you gather helps you to build a picture of the quality of the players around you.

My probable response: Drink beer. It’s almost impossible to be bored while drunk.

Cramp/Stiffness

As I’ve outlined above, poker involves a lot of sitting around doing nothing. This can leave even the most flexible of people feeling like they’ve been held captive in a contortionist’s practice box for the day.

This isn’t helped by traditional poker table layouts, which usually crams nine or ten people onto the same table – meaning you are never more than a chronic smoker’s breath away from your opponents. Grim.

Legitimate response: Stretch your legs between hands. Go for a quick walk, check on how your friends are doing or stay by your table if you’re not keen on missing any of the action.

My probable response: Stretch my legs … by walking to the bar.

Body odour

Whether it’s the general lack of a female presence, the extraordinary lengths of time they spend at the table or that they’ve simply spent all of their money on poker rather than toiletries is anyone’s guess – but the fact remains: Poker players stink.

This isn’t the smell of someone who has forgotten to put on deodorant that day. A forgivable, if unpleasant, oversight. This is the overriding stench of built-up dirt and sweat from years, possibly decades, of habitual non-washing.

Imagine a rotting cow carcass, left in the hot sun all day before being gently marinated in the bin juice scavenged from a greasy spoon. That’s the smell of your average poker player. A smell so dense it is difficult to tell whether it’s actually a smell at all, arguably it’s more of a taste in the back of your throat.

Legitimate response: Ignore it. As disgusting as it is, it’s not against the rules to be a smelly beggar. Try to stay down-wind of the worst offenders.

My probable response: Drink more. When the smell becomes unbearable, create an air pocket with my hands and breathe steadily out through the mouth and in through the nose. The sweet aroma of malty hops beats body odour any day of the week.

Annoying drunk guys

Ahem. Okay, obviously the ‘drunk annoying guy’ is usually me. Almost always, in fact. But at the risk of sounding hypocritical, it is really irritating when you have a loud, obnoxious pisshead at the table.

In my defence, I’m a pretty quiet drunk when playing poker, which is not always the case with some of the weekend crowd spotted in some casino poker tournaments.

Harassing the dealer, berating other players and getting irate when their awful play sees them lose a hand, they can disrupt the natural flow of the game. The most annoying are the lucky ones who pick up chips by mindlessly bumbling through hands and hitting miracles on the river.

Legitimate response: Take advantage. These players are normally pretty terrible. Even the adept ones will have impaired judgement. Use this opportunity to collect their chips before they spew them to someone else.

My probable response: Keep one step ahead of their drinking. Drunk people are only annoying when you’re not drunk. It’s almost too simple a solution …

When in Rome ...

Conclusion

Only time will tell what approach I take in the Las Vegas Team Challenge tomorrow: Intelligent, focused and strategic or moronic, drunken and degenerate.

In all seriousness though, I will be playing to win and the top prize of a trip to Las Vegas with a huge chunk of spending money to play in the World Series is a good enough incentive for me to be at my best.

I will be posting tweets throughout the day to keep the blog updated with my progress. These should show up in the right-hand side toolbar or can be viewed at my poker Twitter page.

I’ll also do a full review of the weekend on Monday, with pics, videos and maybe some interviews.

 

Gearing up for the Las Vegas Team Challenge

Okay, I admit, I may – just may – have neglected the blog a bit. A barely noticeable blip of five months without a post.

The main reason is pretty straight-forward, I’ve not been playing much poker, a fairly important ingredient for a blog about my poker-playing escapades.

However, with a dearth in freelance work on the horizon and the upcoming Las Vegas Team Challenge live tournament just a month away, it seems a good time to shake off some ring rust.

The Team Challenge is a fairly intriguing prospect. It begins with an online league of poker teams, each with four people per side. Every week, you and your teammates play multi-table tournaments online, with your final position from these tournaments being converted into ‘points’. The higher you place, the more points you score.

After eleven weeks, your team’s total points is totted up and represents how many ‘extra’ chips your team receives at the live final in Birmingham on the weekend of March 3^rd.

Should your team win the live final, there is a $48,000 Las Vegas package for first prize, which will coincide with the World Series of Poker. Boom.

Unfortunately, it’s nine weeks in and our team’s performance has been decidedly average.

We’re currently sitting mid-table with 3,100 points. To put that in perspective, the team in first place has 16,210. That means each player on their team will start with roughly double our chips at the live final.

The good thing is that a couple of high finishes puts the team straight back in contention, but with only two weeks to go, it’s a tough task.

I will keep the blog updated over the next two weeks and I’ll try to keep a play-by-play account going on the days of the live final (with pictures and maybe interviews with other players).

I’ve not yet decided whether I will tee-total the final, or throw caution to the wind and drown myself in an avalanche of alcohol and shame – it is a special occasion after all.

As for my own Challenge, I’ve totally been slacking but still made a bit of progress. A few small multi-table cashes and a second-place in a Sit ‘N’ Go means I’m edging towards $200. Almost $10,000.

Clearly, I didn’t hit any of my targets from October, but my new totals are below and I will continue to update a little bit more regularly … maybe.

Summary

Challenge: +$25.32

Total profit so far: $189.28

 

Live tournament streak ends

My hot streak in live tournaments has come to an end, having today busted out of a tourney held at Circle Casino in Manchester in double-quick time.

A friend of mine had been complaining about Grosvenor Casinos’ extortionate fees for tournaments, with a £15 event having £4 added on. So instead we decided to go for Circle’s Saturday night £15 + £2 tournament.

If only we had known how terrible the structure would be.

After we’d registered, we quickly saw that the blind levels started at 50/100, with starting stacks of 5,000 – this meant 50 big blinds as opposed to the 100 that you get at Grosvenor.

Furthermore, the blind levels went up every ten minutes! Within an hour they were on 200/400 and I’d probably only had 25 or so hands.

None of this would have mattered if I had managed to get some decent cards. Unfortunately, my best three hands were pocket 3s, A-10 off-suit and king-jack suited.

With rapidly increasing blinds and poor cards, there wasn’t really much wriggle room and I ended up busting out on a rather pathetic flush draw with overs.

Most frustratingly, we had a drunk guy on the table (not me this time!) and he was intentionally holding up the game. He received several warnings and had the clock called on him a ton, but it still slowed up proceedings considerably.

While most of this is sour grapes, I do think the structure was pretty horrible and I came away feeling deeply unsatisfied from my night of poker. I will definitely be avoiding this tournament in the future.

My friend and I decided to take a piece of each other’s action before the tournament started, meaning we would share 20% of any winnings either of us got.

He made it to the final table, but fell just short of making the money by coming 6th (top four paid).

Although neither of us got paid off on this occasion, I do like the idea of staking each other, as it means we can compensate for each other’s downswings.

I’m still hoping to play in the Genting Poker Players’ Championship later this month, but admittedly it is looking like a tall order, as I won’t be able to stump up the £165 entry fee directly.

This means I’m reliant on qualifying through a satellite, but at £15 a pop and only one person receiving a ticket, these are pretty steep themselves.

I will give myself one attempt at a satellite for the tourney, and then regrettably give up on the idea of playing in the tournament, although I am intrigued to see how I would fare against a much higher calibre of player.

Summary

Live poker: -£17

Total winnings from live poker: +£174

 

Alcohol and poker: Round II

A couple of weeks ago I won a tournament after having several beers. After the win, I discussed the pros and cons of drinking while playing and I reached the conclusion that, in moderation, alcohol can be beneficial in adding a bit of aggression to your game.

With that in mind, I went to the G Casino in Bolton and played in a £20 tournament. Unfortunately, I didn’t stick to my own advice and got absolutely hammered.

Instead of playing better, I was much much worse. I was so drunk that I was unaware of what the blinds and antes were, meaning I over-raised on loads of hands, needlessly committing extra chips.

I also managed to under-raise when I was trying to steal the blinds with Q4 off-suit. This meant I flat called instead of raising. Luckily, the flop was favourable and I was able to take it down with a later bet.

Normally, beer would make me play more hands, but because I didn’t trust my judgement, I was being really nitty and folding some fairly big hands in position.

Despite all this, I managed to reach the final table through an amazing run of luck in showdowns – including being all-in with KJ against AK and hitting trip jacks.

I even went to the final table as one of the larger stacks and would have been an overwhelming chip leader if I had held up on a coinflip with pocket 3s just before the break.

Me and my friend Michael (Mick) made it to the final table

I’d gone with two friends and one of them, Mick, also made it to the final table.

Here is where my insobriety really punished me. I sat in the wrong seat! Mick and I were the last two to the table and I ended up sitting in his seat.

It was only the day after that we noticed what happened, to my great chagrin – particularly as he made it to 5th and got £200, whereas I busted out in 9th and got just £85.

Despite my poor play, I actually did manage to get my money in good on the last hand. Someone pushed with Q9 and I picked up AQ.

However, karma reared its ugly head and I found myself getting beat by trip 9s. An almost identical hand to where I sucked out with KJ earlier.

At least, this is what I’ve been told happened. You see, I was so drunk that when I woke up the next day I could barely remember anything from the final table and I’ve had to ask my friends to fill in the gaps so that I could write this post.

Here are the positives and negatives from the tournament summarised

Positives

• For the first two hours, I played some pretty good poker. I made a couple of nice plays that I was very pleased with
• I’ve made two out of two final tables in live tournaments
• I didn’t really feel there were any players that were a massive threat

Negatives

• I played way too tight. I did suffer from pretty polarised hands in that I had either premium cards or absolute crap, so I ended up playing a standard tight-aggressive style
• I got too drunk (obviously). This not only meant I was guilty of some horiffic errors in judgment, it also ate away any profit I made on the night (the £40 profit I made all went on beer)
• I was lucky. I was all-in about 3 times when we were down to the last 15 or so entrants and my hand held up every time

The biggest lesson I’ve learnt is to make sure I limit the beers I have when I’m in a tournament like this. No more than 4 pints over the course of the night.

It’s gutting to think I could have made 5th or better if I had just sat in the right seat. Mick had started with less chips than me too. Only a few big blinds worth less, but with the blinds at 3,000/6,000 and 500 antes, it could have made the difference.

The top prize was around £900, although some of this was shaved off to give money to the person who finished 10th, as originally the format only paid people who made the top 9.

Better luck next time.

As a side note, I’m suffering a bit of a downswing on the Challenge recently through a mixture of bad luck and a few poor decisions.

It’s probably not worth making a whole new post about it, so I will summarise this week’s losses here instead.

Summary

Live poker profit: +£40 (The tournament was £25 entry, with one £20 add-on and I won £85)

Total casino profit: £191

Challenge: -$17.50

Total Challenge profit: $161.95

 

Reading poker tells: Over-rated or an important edge?

Online poker has dominated the scene over the last decade or so, giving birth to a new breed of young, aggressive, mathematically focused players that are able to play 20+ tables at once to extract maximum profit.

In this environment, the skill of being able to read tells has been reduced to noticing specific betting patterns or hand ranges.

With so many tables open, most players rely on software such as Poker Tracker to collect information, allowing them to make decisions based on a variety of different statistics.

Obviously, being stuck behind a computer screen prevents you from seeing how your opponent behaves during the course of a hand, making it impossible to extract information on the strength of his cards other than to judge how he plays them.

However, in live tournament play, picking up tells can be a powerful weapon to add to your arsenal, particularly when you are playing at low-stakes games.

Even at the highest stakes, there are enough amateur players entering (and running deep) to make it a worthwhile skill to possess, even if it isn’t exactly foolproof.

Let’s look at some examples. What makes these quite interesting is that they are from televised final table events with huge prizepools, meaning tells can still be evident at this level.

#1 Looking disinterested

If someone looks disinterested in their hand it is often a pretty big tell that they have a monster (unless they fold preflop of course, sometimes people are just bored!).

In the most extreme cases, this can be accompanied by a yawn, a big sigh or gazing around the room to give off the impression they are weak.

Here is an example from series eight of the World Poker Tour involving amateur Jeremy Brown and online heads-up specialist Olivier Busquet.

There are a number of tells Brown shows throughout this hand, with most of them picked up by commentators Mike Sexton and Vince Van Patten.

40-46 seconds: Brown shakes his head at the flop, but has a massive grin

58 seconds to 1:05 minutes: Brown looks around the room, supposedly agonising over his decision

1:06 minutes: Big sigh … “How can I possibly call this”

This should definitely get the “Monster Alert” sirens going, but amazingly Busquet misses all of this, probably because he spends the hand looking at the felt rather than his opponent.

A general rule of thumb in poker is that players will often act strong when they are weak and vice versa. So also be on the look out for people shoving in their chips aggressively – this could mean they are on a marginal hand or a draw.

Now, these tells were pretty obvious and they are certainly something to watch out for when you’re playing.

However, you should also be aware that some people will try and pull the wool over your eyes by putting on an act.

For example, they will be thinking “I know that he knows that people act weak when they are strong, so I’ll act strong when I’m strong.”

This makes tells like this pretty unreliable, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. Particularly in local tournaments where it is unlikely the above kind of levelling is going on.

#2 Microexpressions

For me, microexpressions are a much more reliable poker tell than other behavioural changes. I’ve not actually read or heard anything about microexpressions in relation to poker, so I’m making this up as I go along, but I definitely think there is some merit in the idea.

Microexpressions (if you couldn’t be bothered clicking on the link) are exceedingly brief, involuntary changes to a person’s facial expression that usually display happiness, disgust or fear.

What makes them important in a poker context is that they are very difficult to fake and almost as hard to hide.The problem is that they are almost imperceptible, meaning they are easily missed.

Here is an example, again from the World Poker Tour. This time between 2-time WSOP bracelet winner Mark Seif and Dan Heimiller.

Blink and you might miss it, but at 1:51, when the 9♦ comes on the river, Heimiller nods slightly and smiles for the briefest of seconds. I think this is a microexpression.

Now, I’m willing to admit I am probably over-analysing. It’s easy to make these comments when you have the luxury of knowing his cards (plus I can rewind and watch it again), but I certainly think it is worth examining your opponents when the dealer brings new cards out, just to see how they react. You may save yourself money.

Note: Even if he missed this tiny tell, I think Seif made a pretty poor call here. Seif is an excellent player, far better than me, but I think he should make the tough laydown when Heimiller bets the river.

The lead out bet on the river is so strong, it reeks of a boat or flush, and I think the chances of Heimiller floating to the river with air are pretty slim. That puts the hands Seif can beat down to a busted spade flush.

Ultimately, I would say being able to read tells is an excellent skill to possess as a poker player, but it is definitely overshadowed by other, more important, skills.

Having a good basis in maths will definitely give you a bigger edge over the long term, as will the ability to analyse a hand step by step to try and isolate your opponents’ hand ranges.

It’s just a shame I suck at those.

 

First tournament win at live poker

I won my first tournament since I started playing poker again on Monday, and it came from an unlikely source – live poker. I’ve not really played much casino poker over the years, and on those occasions I’ve been pretty terrible.

The main reason, I believe, is because I often go with other friends and I hate the thought of going out first and having to wait around for them to play. Selfish? Totally. However, this approach usually leads to me being an absolute nit, only playing premium hands in position and slowly blinding myself to oblivion after a couple of hours.

This time though, I played pretty aggressively and it helped me to win first place. Unfortunately, the prize pool wasn’t particularly impressive. The event was a £15 buy-in at the Grosvenor Casino in Manchester, although £5 of each entry went on bounties. If you knocked someone out, you received £5 (or £20 if you knocked out randomly allocated super bounties).

While this makes the game a bit more fun, it also drastically reduces the prizepool for those who place, so I only received £170 for my win (£150 for first and £20 in bounties). What’s even more aggravating is that I missed out on three bounties where I absolutely crippled people during an all-in, but because they had a few more chips they survived only to be knocked out a couple of hands later for someone else to pick up the money, with one being a juicy £20 one.

That aside, there were a number of positives and negatives that I have taken away from the win:

Positives

• I only made one serious mistake all tournament (which, incidentally, nearly knocked me out)
• I felt confident I was one of the best players there
• I managed to maintain aggression despite my usual tendency to clam up in casinos

Negatives

• The mistake I did make was horrific, a bad bluff that was NEVER going to work against the kind of opponents you meet in casinos
• I definitely need to brush up on my poker face and keep a lid on my emotions. Somehow playing in a piddly little tournament had my heart racing like a greyhound on crack. More competitive live experience is required, something you can’t learn online
• I was pretty jammy! I won all my coinflips and no-one outdrew me when I held the best hand. I was all-in three times and I won all three

I did have a fantastic time though and it is far more exhilarating than playing online. I will definitely be looking around for some tournaments in my area to try and boost my live skills, which haven’t really had a workout since I was in first year of university in 2003.

Unfortunately, I got home after the event and realised I hadn’t taken any pictures of my final chip stack or my winning hand (AJos) as a memento of my first live casino win. I appreciate it’s not the WSOP, but I think a photo always breaks up a blog post pretty well! Maybe next time.

I’ll also take a note of any interesting hands I get involved in, as I can barely remember any of the ones from Monday.

Summary

Casino poker profit: £151 (£170 – £15 entry – £4 extortionate tournament fees)