World Series of Poker, Day 6

I've been following the minute-by-minute action thanks to Pauly's blog (http://taopoker.blogspot.com/). Combined with the more contemplative posts here, you get a real sense of what it's like to be there and how to interpret what's going on.

I'd like to see Ivy win -- he's a pro's pro, as intense and focused on his sport as Tiger Woods in golf or Michael Jordan in basketball -- but personally I'm rooting for Fossilman. It bothered me that he was portrayed by ESPN last year as an amature/novice, when he's got a good resume and name among the people who follow the sport regularly. He's the real deal, and seems to be a genuine gentleman to boot. Moneymaker's plummeting performance after his win cheapened the title to some degree in my opinion, whereas Raymer's continued to excel. As much fun as it is to see a relative nobody beat the best in the world, it's just as heartening to see the true professionals demonstate that skill DOES matter.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, Ed, on the effect ESPN and the Moneymaker win have had on poker in general. Has the flood of amatures entering major events made it harder or easier for the professionals? What pitfalls do you see looming on the horizon for a sport that's suddenly no longer the intimate club it used to be? How will the advent of Big Money change things?

Jeff-
I wouldn't be at all unhappy with Raymer winning it again. It would be a truly incredible accomplishment. And I agree with you completely about Raymer being portrayed as an amateur qualifier when he has been playing serious tournament poker for a long time. Moneymaker was a true amateur, he'd never played in a live poker tournament in his life. Raymer was well known in the Northeast as a very good no limit poker player. But he wasn't a name that folks at home would recognize.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, Ed, on the effect ESPN and the Moneymaker win have had on poker in general. Has the flood of amatures entering major events made it harder or easier for the professionals? What pitfalls do you see looming on the horizon for a sport that's suddenly no longer the intimate club it used to be? How will the advent of Big Money change things?

Obviously, it's had a huge effect on poker. The success of the World Poker T*ur on television and the World Series on ESPN, combined with the success of unknown amateur players, has turned poker into the hottest game there is. The biggest result has been the amazing increase in prize money. It used to be that the only tournament with a million dollar first prize was the WSOP main event. Now there are million dollar tournaments every week around the country. For those of us who are not professionals but play casino poker, it's been great. It's brought a lot of people into the casinos who think they know how to play because they've watched it on TV, but who don't understand the differences between tournament play and cash game play, or between no limit and limit play.
As for the pros, I think it depends on who you ask. Phil Hellmuth would probably complain that it's brought a lot of players into the game who aren't smart enough for his brilliant strategy to work on them, but I think that's sour grapes. The cardinal rule of poker, in my view, is this: there is no right way to play. There is no perfect strategy for poker. The right way to play changes every time you sit down, and every time someone else sits down at the same table with you. That's what makes the game so interesting. It's a game that can't be mastered because every situation is different. Some of the pros realize this and adjust their game; some don't. I don't think Hellmuth has adjusted well at all. Daniel Negreanu, on the other hand, has really hit his stride in the last 3 years during the time when more amateurs have been playing and he's gone from a solid pro player to one of the very best and most successful in the game.

Have you seen anything about whether/how the "lipstick cams" have changed poker strategy or theory? We now have several years' worth of data showing hole cards. I'd think that somebody (an academic,perhaps) will have analyzed that information and compared it to traditional ideas about "playing the players, not the cards" and the like.

I can't believe I spelled "amateur" wrong. Sigh. Any day now they're going to revoke my English degree.

Have you seen anything about whether/how the "lipstick cams" have changed poker strategy or theory?

I've wondered the same thing. It used to be that you'd potentially walk away from a table never to know if you were bluffed or not on key hands. Not anymore, it's all there in living color. I'd think a pro would watch all the "game film" s/he could find on potential opponents. Now they've got the advantage of knowing what cards were in the hand during which bets. That seems like it would be an enormous advantage.

If I were a pro and could afford it, I'd have some assistants scouring all the coverage they could find, setting up charts of how the "names" bet each combination of cards. It'd be like sitting behind their should on virtually every hand, that kind of insight is huge.

It seems to me that poker has entered "bullet time". Thanks to the internet, you can play thousands of more hands than you ever could have face to face, getting the experience of years in just a few short months. The same is true for the lipstick cam and TV. If you wanted to know how certain people bet with certain cards you pretty much had to be there in person to gamble with them. Now it's open to spreadsheets, and you can learn an opponent's tendencies in a fraction of the time it would've taken you before.

Jeff Chamberlain wrote:

Have you seen anything about whether/how the "lipstick cams" have changed poker strategy or theory? We now have several years' worth of data showing hole cards. I'd think that somebody (an academic,perhaps) will have analyzed that information and compared it to traditional ideas about "playing the players, not the cards" and the like.

The players themselves have done so, for their own use. Howard Lederer has said that he has every single tournament ever shown on TV since the invention of the hole camera on DVD, and that he has DVDs made for each player he might face with every hand they've played. So if he's facing a final table of 5 other players, he might well be able to go back the night before and look at a DVD of every hand that 2 or 3 of them have played on television. This is actually one area where an industrious unknown has an advantage against, say, TJ Cloutier. He's seen TJ play hundreds of hands on television, while TJ hasn't seen him play at all.

I think I'd say that the lipstick camera effect is somewhat over-rated. I understand why it might be useful to someone like Lederer, whose margin against top players is built on picking up on subtle moves. On the other hand, you're only seeing the hands that some video editor decided were interesting for one reason or another. Maybe it was a good play or a bad mistake or maybe someone just said something clever during the hand. That means that, while you might pick up a trick play here or there, as a statistical guide to how somone plays, it's a hugely biased sample. For someone whose game isn't solid at the outset, picking up a hand or two because you know a trick isn't gonna save you against them in the long run.

Perhaps "gaming" professors and math professors have access to more of the raw data than just the hands that are shown on TV ... But there's been a lot of hands shown on TV and I'd think that data would still be fascinating and useful even though biased.

Ivey and Raymer out. The final table -

1. Aaron Kanter $10.7M
2. Tex Barch $9.33M
3. Andrew Black $8.14
4. Mike Matusow $7.41
5. Steve Dannenmann $5.46M
6. Joseph Hachem $5.42
7. Daniel Bergsdorf $5.27
8. Scott Lazar $3.37
9. Brad Kondracki $1.18

I am counting this correctly -- 1 pro and 8 amateurs? Should make for some non-riveting television.

Lady Luck finally caught up with Raymer. He lost huge pots on suckouts apparently. He lost A-8 against K-7, then lost with pocket kings to QJ when a flush hit the board for his opponent. That crippled him. Ivey got knocked out taking pocket jacks against pocket kings. ESPN can't be happy about losing those two from the potential final table, but that will just make Matusow even more of their focus when they air the tournament.

I seriously do not want to be misunderstood: I do not want to be obstreperous, but I merely want to understand. And I do not understand the fascination with poker. I've watched celebrity poker on Bravo and so forth.

And I understand (barely) the fascination with chess.

But poker? Can someone please explain it to me?

raj,

I guess it's one of those things you either get or you don't. Didn't we compile a list of such things a few weeks back?

But first thing to keep in mind is that poker is not a game of cards, it's a game of money. It's like any other sport or game...the thrill of victory, and the agony of the bad beat.

Dave, don't read too much into my comment.

There was an article in the Boston Globe about the tournament a couple of days ago. I can't find the link, but the article was interesting. I had no idea that the tournament existed, until Ed mentioned it here. And I would have likely passed over the Globe article, except for the fact that Ed noted the tournament here.

Sean Carroll, the UC cosmologist, wrote a post last year in response to something I'd written that really explains well the allure of poker, I think. He wrote:

The secret of the allure (and challenge) of poker is that it's a game of incomplete information, the kind game theorists love to think about. You know the cards you already have, and you (should) know the probabilities of various further cards coming your way, but you have to infer your opponents' hands from tiny hints (their bets, their positions at the table, their personal styles, etc). Texas Hold-Em is so popular because it manages to accurately hit the mark between "enough information to devise a consistently winning strategy" and "not enough information to do much more than guess." The charm in such games is that there is no perfect strategy, in the sense that there is no algorithm guaranteed to win in the long run against any other algorithm. The best poker players (and there are a good number of people who earn their living from poker, so it's by no means "gambling") are able to use different algorithms against different opponents, as the situation warrants.

I agree with him. What makes poker so interesting to me is that the game changes every single time you play it, depending on the players in the game. Even if you play a regular home game like I do, with pretty much the same players every week, the psychology of the game is fascinating. When we first started our home game a year and a half or so ago, I dominated the game week after week. But the other players started getting better as they played more, and I had to change my tactics to keep winning.
But at a table full of strangers, it may be even more interesting. The old cliche is that you don't play the cards, you play the player, and it's true. So you have to look for clues to what kind of player they are, how they might react in a certain situation. Those clues could be found in how they dress, how they stack their chips (a helter skelter chip stack usually indicates a helter skelter style, for example), and so forth. I think the same thing fascinates me about poker as fascinated me about Sherlock Holmes when I was a child - the need for careful observation and logical thinking to understand what you observe. Like almost any competitive activity, there are many levels of expertise and those at the top of the game are thinking on a very different level than those who just play casually.