Bad Beat Dissection

Just for kicks, I plugged in the first 5 bad beats into some poker evaluation software and came up with the following table:

Me	Opp.	Board	Pot	%win	EV	actual
Ac As	7s 8s	3s Js 4c	$ 49.20	0.671	$ 33.00	$ (49.20)
Ks Kc	Qs Js	2d 9s Jd	$ 43.95	0.769	$ 33.78	$ (43.95)
Ks Kc	Qs 7s	4s 8s 6c	$ 8.75	0.578	$ 5.06	$ (8.75)
Kc Qs	As 9s	7s 5c Qd	$ 28.00	0.830	$ 23.25	$ (28.00)
As Jd	Kd Ks	2d Ah Jh	$ 16.85	0.900	$ 15.17	$ (16.85)
			Totals		$ 110.26	$(146.75)

Interestingly enough, my actual results were over $250 away from my expected results. So finishing the night only down $40 isn't that big of a disaster. I'm looking forward to seeing the other side of that variation in the nights to come.

And thanks SirFWALGMan for the words of enouragement.

The Good 'Ole Bad Beat Post

When does 5 for 5 get you 0 for 5? As I type this, it just became 0 for 6.

Six times I've put people all-in post flop and six times I've been the favorite to win the hand.

I won ZERO times. That'd be a goose egg. Nada. Squat. Bupkus. The last time, the fucker typed "hahaha" in the chatbox. In person, he'd be spitting out some chicklets and I'd be in handcuffs, but smiling.

Someone please prevent that from happening in Vegas, k? K. The bad beats I mean.

***EDIT***

So after my crushings, a certain Mr. Carter came by and sat down for, oh I'd say, 20 minutes. The guy dominated, going from $25 to $117. He busted the guy twice who laughed at outdrawing me. That was fun to watch. Carter played well, but there were hands where people just handed over the cash with such poor bluffs that it wasn't even a challenge for him. Spend my money wisely. :)

All Quiet on the Home Front

The 'rents were in town to see the grandkids this weekend. Add to that the fact that I'm coming down with/fighting a chest cold and I'm just about whipped. Lifting weights when you can't really breathe without coughing is not a good idea.

Got to play a little bit this weekend, Studio Glyphic managed to track me down at a $50 buy-in table. I decided to dip my toes into the higher limit for a bit on Sunday just to see how it went. Luckily I nearly tripled my buy-in to make back some of the downswings the $25 tables gave me.

I hope to have my bi-weekly $30 buy-in NL game again on Saturday. But as the holidays approach, my guess is that attendence will be hard to come by.

Shameless shot of my poker table awaiting the next round of players. Excuse the low-bandwidth of my cable modem.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the poker blog scene really seems to have slowed down a bit with all the old guard on hiatus or vacation. Pauly, Otis, Iggy, Al - I miss the daily or near-daily posts. But I'm a junkie for content in case you didn't realize it.

CTL-ATL-DEL

Sometimes, you just gotta hit the reset button.

I was at my normal dealer's choice ring game last night and we had a full table of 9 people. Normally we have 7 and like to keep it to a maximum of 8, but since my father was in town and wanted to play, the group accomodated. We're good like that.

We had one other new player at the table, a neighbor of the host. And he managed to put me on tilt.

Generally, the group of people we play with enjoy good games of poker. That's P-O-K-E-R. Games with ever-changing wild cards, games with the "drop if you fold, hold 'em if you stay" plays, and their ilk are not P-O-K-E-R. The new guy not only brought these games to our environment, but also managed to explain their rules so poorly that he had the remaining 8 players just staring blankly at each other, all thinking the same "What the fuck are you talking about?" thoughts.

Making matters worse, the new guy was winning. You know how the classic calling-station manages to have a winning session every now and then? Well this was an example of that.

Before you knew it, I was down over $100 and it wasn't even 10pm yet.

That's when I hit the reset button. I folded a hand, got up from the table and took a walk around the house. I grabbed a beer and a handful of snacks and just stood in another room for a few minutes while the hand was played out.

I thought to myself that with 9 players, I'm gonna need a hand. And these guys will pay me off when I get my hands, I just have to wait for them.

Over the course of the next 2 1/2 hours, I made back my $100 and then another $130, finishing up for the night. That walk I took was possibly the best 5 minute investment of time I ever made.

Poker Apparel

I'm not sure how good these will come out, but the one previous time I ordered something from cafepress it turned out to be a quality piece of clothing.

Anyway, with that said, I did some minorly creative artwork and uploaded the image for use on a shirt. I'll be wearing one to Vegas next month:

Hammer Time Shirts

Comments, critiques are welcome.

Statistically Significant

From a comment by SirFWALGMan:

why not a writeup about why 5K hands is statistically nothing in Poker

While I can't give a writeup on this myself, much smarter people have, namely some computer science majors at the University of Alberta.

A decent article/research paper on the development of Loki, their computer A.I.-based poker player can be found here: Using Probabilistic Knowledge and Simulation to Play Poker

The gist of the whole thing is that 5,000 hands is a decent sample size if you're playing against a homogeneous set of opponents. That is just not the case at Party Poker. The above paper recommends 25,000 hands as the cutoff for a statistically significant sample size.

My guess would be that these numbers were not derived theoretically using statistical formulas and the like, but more probably developed empirically through computer simulations. With enough simulations, you can easily determine at which point the number of additional samples yields no statistically different results.

Cool stuff if you're into that type of thing.

Bad Beat Story - How I Brought the Pain

I'm used to being on the receiving end of runner-runner suckouts; but tonight, it's my turn to inflict the emotional damage on others that has been inflicted on me.

I'm sitting in MP2 with Kd, Jh. EP raises from .50 to $1.00 and MP1 raises from $1.oo to $1.50. I think to myself that this in no-limit and these are pretty weak raises. So I cold call the $1.50 and see a flop. That move was questionable, especially given the trouble hand that is K,Jo.

The flop is J,T,4 - all diamonds, giving me top pair decent kicker and the 2nd nut flush draw.

EP checks, and MP1 goes all in. About $50 into a $5 pot. Prior to this hand, MP1 has probably gone all-in and overbet the pot perhaps 10 times in 45 minutes. I'm thinking draw. As I only have about $18 left, I call. Well so does EP.

Here are the hands:

EP: A,5 diamonds - nut flush
MP1: Q,Q - overpair to my top pair
MP2 (yours truly): - Crap on rye

Now let's see how the turn and river slowly improve my hand, 1 step at a time.

Turn: Js - Hey great, now I have trips J's overtaking MP1's QQ but still behind the nut flush of EP.
River: Kc - Sweet - boat.

Crap on rye has just been transformed into $55 dollars in cash money!

In all honesty, I'm not too pleased with my play here. It was less than optimal. But damn, the results sure do ease the misgivings of playing so poorly. Rock on!