Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Sex toys and tractors

Big thank you to everyone who listened to and commented on our new podcast, The Chip Race. We were all pretty overwhelmed by the positive response. Our second episode, featuring Fergal Nealon, Dan Wilson, Chris Dowling and Ciaran Cooney (and starring Jamesy Walsh who uniquely conflated sex toys and tractors), went out on Monday evening. Traditionally podcast listenership tapers off after the first episode, but we are hoping to buck that trend. We have committed to giving our time and effort to an 8 week first season: beyond that it will depend on listener response and numbers as to whether it's worthwhile to continue. Most of the credit for the show (and the response to date) goes to David Lappin, who not only is the host but effectively the producer and editor. For those who don't know, Dave's dad Arthur is a pretty successful movie producer ("In The Name Of The Father", "My Left Foot"), and clearly Dave inherited some of the family production skills. The most common comment I heard was the show sounded as good as radio (presumably in contrast to most podcasts which can sound like two guys Skyping each other from separate bathtubs).

Online has continued to go well. My return to satellites continues to be profitable, and I final tabled two biggish ones on Sunday, the Bigger 8.80 and the Hotter 44. Unfortunately I busted the latter in 9th after being crippled just before the final table when my kings lost out to AQ and Ace rag in a three way all in for chiplead. I started the final table of the Bigger 8.80 3/9 with what seemed like a decent shot, but barely won a pot and my first shove (with 7 left) ran straight into aces. It was a good Sunday generally for the Firm: Daragh got 2nd in the 888 major, Nick made the second last table of the Milly (busting just before Gavonater), Kevin Killeen got 5th in the Bigger 55, Jesse won another smaller Stars game, and Lappin scooped a couple of satellites.

On the live front, the Norwegians have landed. Citywest has been invaded by them on their annual visit to our shores to play their national poker championships. As ever, JP is to be commended for organising the biggest festival of the year in Ireland (and one of the biggest in the world). I've played a few events so far without troubling the scorers, including yesterday's High Roller. I was pretty psyched up for it as I saw it as a great chance for me, and took the night before off to be fully rested for it. As it was, it was one of the most dismal tournaments ever for me personally. Almost nothing playable for 3 hours and then when I do pick up a hand (kings) I smash right into aces. Hope on the QJT flop, and even more outs after a king of the turn (meaning any river card over 9 won or chopped the pot), only for a tantalising 9 to hit the river.

It's fair to say I was pretty tilted on the drive home, as I felt at the top of my game, like I was picking up everything except cards. I'd sold a significant amount for it, which only added to the tilt factor. As much as I hate losing my own money, losing other people's money annoys me even more (which probably explains why I rarely sell these days), and at the very least I was hoping to give investors a better sweat than a few tweets of me dwindling from 30k down to 20k, then getting in kings against aces. But it was not to be.

Nothing clears tilt better than a slow drive home through rush hour traffic. Wait, what? That should read "Anything clears tilt better than a slow drive home through rush hour traffic". But still, I'm not the type to dwell on setbacks for too long, and had recovered by the time we got home to fire up an online session. Poker is one long session that lasts a lifetime and the outcome of any one session doesn't matter in the long run, but that said it's always nice to book a winning one after a live disappointment. And thankfully I managed to do just that, mainly thanks to satellites.

On the subject of satellites, Paul Seaton did an excellent interview recently with Tamer Kamel. One comment by Tamer caught my eye:

"They can be very time consuming and also if you’re not careful you can spend too much money on them and find yourself having bought in already in terms of sat buy-ins. However if you treat them correctly they are great value. They are becoming harder and harder and it is the same pros you find yourself playing against time after time and that maybe discourages others from playing them but if you want to play against the best you have to beat the best sooner or later.

Some online players spend most of their time just grinding these satellites because after you have won a package or a seat you get the buy-in in tournament money. I personally am against this as I’d like to see new players winning the seats to ensure the live event is busy. If the same person wins two or three packages then that could have been two people who would have played the live event who are then missing."

On the first point, while I often see amateur players link the buyin to a tournament with how much they want to spend on satellites (and I think that makes sense as they have a budget they want to stick to), I'm surprised to see a pro do so. I (and I'm pretty sure most other pros, and certainly all the ones who specialise in satellites) see no link between the two. Amateur players have a budget, pros have a bankroll, and the only real issues to consider as a pro are whether you are rolled for the satellites (and the target tournament), and whether the satellites in themselves have a positive expectation for you if you play. A satellite is just a tournament where the prize pool equity is paid in buyins to another tournament (or monetary equivalent for supplementary seats), and it shouldn't matter how much you spend on them in relation to the target tournament's buyin. To me, it would be like a 6 max sit n go grinder saying you should quit playing if you brick four in a row, as you have now "spent" more than you can win in the next one you play.

On the final point, again I've heard this argument before, but again, exclusively from amateur players. Again, I understand the frustration of an amateur player trying to qualify for a UKIPT or an Irish Open and not managing it, while seeing specialists like myself win multiple seats. I also understand how that frustration can spill over into a simplistic view that "if they didn't let those guys win more than one, they'd get more people into the tournament". But it is just that: a simplistic (and in my view false) view. The reality (as Stars cottoned on to years ago) is that the sites need repeat offenders like myself to provide liquidity to ensure satellites even run.

I could search for an actual example, but I wouldn't have to search for very long. Last year, Paddy Power offered a cash in option for Irish Open repeat offenders like myself, and I ended up winning seven "seats". This year, after initially announcing they'd do the same again, they did a U turn and decided they wouldn't: anyone winning more than one seat had to sell it to another person. It's not clear to me how exactly they thought this would increase numbers. By definition, you can only sell to someone who was going to buy in anyway, so all this does is place an unnecessary middleman between Paddy and this other person who is now responsible for collecting the money for the ticket (and may have to sell at a slight discount to get the deal done). Once I heard of Paddy's reverse, I reversed my own decision to grind the satellites religiously (and I'm sure other grinders did likewise), meaning less rake for Paddy, less satellites that actually run (most that were scheduled had to be cancelled due to insufficient numbers), and bigger overlays in many of the satellites that did run. And guess what? Despite scrapping the Winter Festival so they could run Irish Open satellites for a full year, it's pretty clear that there will be LESS qualifiers this year than last, and fewer players in the Open itself (when the odds for this year's Open went up, this week's chip race guest Chris Dowling tweeted that the fact that the outsiders were at a mere 200 to 1 shows how pessimistic the sponsors are on numbers this year). Who could have predicted that? (Answer: anyone with half a functioning brain). Right now, Paddy are running their Last Chance Saloon qualifiers nightly. These have been the most successful satellites in previous years, but tonight's had to be cancelled (due to insufficient starters). Meanwhile, Stars who have stuck with allowing multiple winners to cash in for tournament money, ran three UKIPT satellites tonight (despite the fact that many of the regulars are otherwise occupied in Malta or Citywest), generating 5 seats, only one of which I won.

I don't want to pick on Paddy here, it's just that they are the most visible illustration of the point I want to make (that discouraging people from winning more than one satellite actually reduces rather than increases the number of qualifiers for a tournament). Credit to Paddy for running so many satellites at overlays, and the Last Chance Saloon ones at effectively zero rake, but really, they need to look at the matter again and realise that they got this wrong and Stars have got it right. I've given this exact advice to other sites I was involved with in the past who were struggling with live tournament numbers: encourage people to qualify multiple times and that will keep the satellites running. But every time the response was the same: "But if you qualify more than once, that's one less person in the tournament". None of those tours are still around.

Related reading

- Satellite strategy (Poker Player)
- A piece on rebuy strategy for Poker Player


Monday, March 16, 2015

Welcome to the Chip Race

When I was an international ultrarunner, there were two things that me and my fellow ultra runners tended to bitch about when we got together. The first was the lack of general media coverage of our sport. We had world record holders, world and European champions, winners of "majors" like the North Pole marathon and the New York ultra: yet to judge by the (non) coverage we got from national TV radio and press, you'd never know. Our second pet peeve was lack of Government support and funding.

Looking back, I can see that the two were pretty clearly linked (the Government probably saw no reason they should fund something so few people cared about), and I can't help but wonder who was to blame for the first peeve. As runners we tended to take it as a dereliction of duty by the national media not to cover a sport where we as a nation punched way above our weight, but the flip side is perhaps as runners the onus was on us to get them interested. Many of the runners who bitched the most about lack of coverage turned into bitchy prima donnas that were difficult to interview as soon as a reporter did take an interest. It's true that a lot of the time the reporter had a sensationalist "Here's a nutcase who runs around in circles for 24 hours" agenda in mind, but rather than try to educate them, many runners just retreated into a defensive shell.

Poker is a lot more popular in Ireland than ultra running will ever be, yet comparatively it suffers from a similar lack of coverage by the mainstream media. RTE has never really covered poker properly beyond a derisory fly through the bar at Irish Open every year and a sloppily produced (very) late night series that died a death a few years ago. The mainstream press coverage is bitty at best and rarely extends past the fill in name and number template (player X won amount Y). There is no specialist media here, so the coverage we do get tends to be limited to UK based publications and TV shows that take a kindly interest, seeing us as a kind of extension of their own scene. As my first girlfriend Julie (who was English) used to say only half jokingly, the English find it easy enough to warm to the Irish (more so than, say, the French or the Germans) because "you speak the language kind of, you have the same sense of humour sort of, and on a good day Hell if you put your best Aran jumper on you could almost pass for English".

As Irish poker players, it seems to me we have a choice if we feel we deserve more media attention (it is worth noting many don't and would prefer to hide in a cave rather than talk to a journalist). We can either bitch about it, or we can try to do something about it.


This week, in conjunction with David Lappin and Daragh Davey, I will be attempting to do something about it, in the form of a new podcast we are launching called "The Chip Race". The aim is to shine a spotlight on Irish poker beyond the few top players with a sufficient international profile to attract the global media, and to give a fuller picture of the Irish and UK poker scene beyond the big names and big scores. The approach is lighter than most existing poker podcasts and aimed at a more general audience. As such, I'm pretty thrilled our first major guest is Tom Kitt, as there are few nicer or more entertaining guys around than Tom. The podcast is produced by Ocean Blue studios who already do a couple of successful podcasts for cricket (the Slog Sweep) and rugby (Down The Blind Side), and is very much David's baby. He's the one who has put in the bulk of the work pre production. He's also the one I'll be attempting to shovel all the blame on if it doesn't work out for us :)

Given that my last blog was mostly a brag about my fourth Triple Crown, there was a serious danger there would be a sense of deja vu as I came close to another one last week. After winning the 50 rebuy on Party on Wednesday, I won Friday's Hot 30 on French Stars, followed by the Sunday Phoenix on Paddy Power. However, it turned out that given the current woes of the Euro, the Hot 30 prize pool was about a hundred bucks short of the $10k minimum required, so no 5th Triple Crown for me. I did have a couple of more nights to try to get a qualifying third win but despite a couple of FTs couldn't close it out. Ah well, can't win em all I guess (or win a Triple Crown every week).

Related reading:


- Interview with Danny Maxwell for IPB on the Chip Race
- A couple of strategy pieces on whether speech play and showing cards at the table, parts one and two

Friday, March 6, 2015

How (and why) I suck at poker

First, I want to start by thanking everyone who took the time to comment either online or in person in the week or so since my last confession. Given the way my blogging frequency has been tapering off in recent years, and the 50 days between my last two blogs, this one might have been expected to drop some time in late April, but here we are, mostly thanks to you guys who took the trouble to say how much you still enjoy the blog after all these years. It's also been a reasonably interesting week.

On the train into the Fitz End of Month last Thursday I found myself listening to an old Thinking Poker podcast with Gareth Chantler. One thing Gareth said really resonates with me: "I tend to work off the assumption that I suck at poker..." Not many people would describe Gareth as sucking at poker. For readers unfamiliar with him, Gareth is a young man who travels the world supporting himself by beating one of the toughest online games there is, Zoom (he is also in charge of the Full Tilt blog and writes the rather excellent Borderline Gambling for Pokerstars).

As has been widely documented, I made a pretty good start in poker. I never deposited a cent, and spun up a six figure roll from freerolls and signup bonuses. I got headsup in my first live game (in the Fitz), and was crowned European Deepstack champion in my second multiday tournament. That led to a pretty pronounced overconfidence effect which survived until I lost it (along with a quarter of my roll) on my first trip to Vegas.

Since then I've worked on the assumption that I suck at poker, and try to figure out both how and why I suck at poker on a daily basis. 8 years on, I'm stunned at how much I still suck at poker, even though I've improved quite a bit. But despite 8 years and millions of hands, not a day passes by when I'm not faced with at least one situation where I literally have no clue what the best line is. I stare at the screen and the HUD stats and try to run a memory scan through my brain, and all that comes back is "You suck at these spots". So I tag the spot to run through Holdem Resources Calculator later. Or if it's live, I run it by Lappin, Daragh, Nick, Jason, Smidge or Dan. More often that not the number of different answers I get is greater than one, and it's not unknown for it to be greater than five, so I guess I'm not the only one who sucks at poker.

I'm starting to suspect that accepting that I suck at poker, and examining the how and why, is a big part of my overall "success" and longevity. Many of the guys I've seen come and go seemed to have a much higher opinion of their own game than I ever had of mine. That might not just be ego, they may have been better players than me, at least in some senses. But thinking you're perfect or even great is not an attitude that encourages improvement, especially if that improvement requires hard work (which it always does in poker). People tend to overrate the importance of the stuff they do well, and underrate the stuff they're not so good at. I probably do that myself, seeing mental fortitude, discipline, emotional balance, work ethic and game selection trumping technical chops or creativity, but to my mind, winning at poker is simple at least from a procedural point of view. It can be broken down into two basic steps:

(1) Play against people who are worse than you (game selection)
(2) Do that a lot (volume)

The better understanding you have of your own leaks and weaknesses (the how you suck at poker bit), the more likely you are to be able to make the judgements necessary for successful execution of step (1). And if you can move from there to the why you suck at poker, you can not only address existing leaks but possibly cut new ones off at the roots. It's all well and good running the maths on all the unclear spots and working hard on plugging existing leaks, but if you're not careful you can end up just moving the leaks around. As this fine article explains, the human brain has hundreds of cognitive biases arising from a few design flaws in our brains (primarily an overactive pattern recognition algorithm that sees patterns in randomness). Knowing this means you can have the equivalent of a central operator in your brain that critically examines anything you find yourself thinking at the poker table against the list of known biases, with an override option.

My old running coach, Norrie Williamson, in collaboration with professor Tim Noakes, developed a radical model for training long distance runners called the Central Governor theory. The cliffs is that the reason you can run harder and faster as a result of continuous training is essentially not that the muscles get stronger and develop more stamina, but that you convince the part of the brain (the central governor) that determines how fast and far it "allows" you to run (so as not to risk serious damage) to allow you to go a little harder. So training is like a child trying to convince a parent (the central governor) that it can do something safely ("Look ma, no hands").

If there's a central governor in poker, it should be a deeply suspicious parent questioning every new idea the child proposes.

"Are you sure that's an actual tell/betting tendency/read and you're not just seeing a pattern that isn't there?"
"Are you sure you have an edge on this guy post flop to justify this loose preflop call, and that's it sufficient to overcome the preflop edge you're giving him? Are you not just looking for an excuse to play this hand because you're bored?"
"Is this really a fold or are you just convincing yourself it is because you just doubled up and want to hang on to the chips for a while, or it's near the end of day and you're keen to bag up what you already have?"
"Are you really pot committed or are you just calling off the rest of the chips because you've already put so much in there when you know deep down you don't have the right odds to put in the rest?"

I went to the Fitz tired but buoyant. The previous day I'd done my scheduled weekly 30 mile run. I don't normally play after that, but with Mrs Doke still missing in action (or rather in France), I didn't have much to be doing, so after walking the dog and lying on the couch for a few hours watching TV, I fired up the computer and regged a bunch of late session stuff. I ended up winning the $27 30k guaranteed KO on Stars. It's only recently I started playing those (after a conversation with Smidge who described them as the nut games on Stars right now). I put a bit of work into the strategic adjustments you should make for them (and shared my main findings in my next Bluff Europe piece) so it was good to get some pretty quick positive return on that.

I ended up having another late night (or early morning) in the Fitz. My campaigns there tend to go one of two ways:
(a) I start slowly, then run well when the push/fold bit arrives, and end up in the top 4
(b) Same, but I lose the first flip and bust

Thankfully this one was in column (a), and I ended up coming third for 5k. Fun final table with some great young players. The ever impressive Paul McCaffrey bust just before me, and Colm O'Hanlon (fresh from winning the 888 thing in Rathmines) busted me in a race for almost half the chips, before losing headsup to Noel Donaldson (also in good form this year after final tabling the IPC in Galway).

I'd told Lappin I'd stay at his if I missed the last train home but I ended up leaving the Fitz just in time to catch the first morning train. Some much needed kip and another run later, and it was back to the online grind. Because I started a bit later than normal I ended up throwing in some late session turbos I don't normally play, including the $100 10k gtd on Party which I ended up winning. This was also a fun ft as I hit it 1/9 with half the chips, and was able to exploit the ICM misery of the others to get headsup with a 100:1 lead. ICM sometimes gets a bad name as something cowardly nits use as an excuse to keep folding, but the other side of it is once you understand it and have the big tank, you can pound on everyone else with or without cards.

Saturday was back to the live grind in the Maldron. Actually grind is not the right word. From a purely fiscal point of view it makes zero sense for me to play live games in that buyin range, so I do it purely as an enjoyable social experience (as I explained to blogger extraordinaire Danny Maxwell who did a brilliant job photographing and blogging the event for IPB in an interview at one of the breaks).

I didn't make day 2 leaving me free to attack the third leg of a possible PocketFives triple crown on Sunday. With so much on, I was confident of at least getting a shot, but that didn't work out, leaving me two more days to secure the third win.

Monday afternoon was spent in a recording studio for a new venture (full details of which will be announced shortly), after which I instructed my driver (the long suffering Mrs Doke just returned from the country of her birth: she refuses to wear a driver's cap but fulfils the role admirably in every other respect) to get me home asap all the better to start regging qualifying tourneys. Having won already on Stars and Party, that meant casting the web a little wider than normal. I don't play much on Full Tilt these days (it seems more reggy to me than other sites) but I did flick in the $25 10k gtd that starts at 5 because there's not much on at that time of the day with the five figure prizepool needed to qualify for a Triple Crown. I ended up winning that after a pretty tense final table where I ran pretty bad at times and certainly didn't have it all my own way. But I managed to overcome a 2:1 chip deficit headsup to clinch my fourth PocketFives Triple Crown (and first since 2013). So that felt pretty good.

My good run continued into last night where I made a pile of final tables, and won two (the 25k 50r on Party, and an FPS Monaco satellite). I feel like a lot of the work I've put in away from the tables in recent months is paying off, but of course it might just all be variance :)

One last thing: I want to comment on Lee Jones blog on Spin and Goes. I get that it's his job to try and shine these particular turds, but the argument he advances (ignoring a sample size one argument involving one specific player which focuses pointlessly on cEv conveniently ignoring that the main objection to these is cEv counts for less in them than any other poker format) seems to basically boil down to "These are new. New is good. New things in the past were criticised when they were new but they turned out to be good, so if you're against these new things, you're a stick in the mud like those Luddites who prefer film to digital". There are some good arguments that could be made for Spin and Goes, but right now Stars don't seem to want to even try to make them. This particular line strikes me as pretty facile, bordering on insulting to our intelligence as a community. Yes, lots of things that were new in the past were criticised but worked out well. Even more things didn't work out so well. And at the risk of losing the argument purely through Godwin's law, I want to point out that the "you're a stick in the mud if you oppose this new thing" was used by the Nazis for everything.

Related reading:

- Are training sites the poker equivalent of gym memberships? My latest Bluff Europe piece
- A piece on live tells (Poker Player)
- Satellite end game strategy (Poker Player)

Related listening:

- Gareth Chantler (Thinking Poker podcast)
- Me on same (Thinking Poker podcast)

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