Easy Free Casino Cash Live

“Back to quits” is one of my favorite poker expressions, although I don’t think it is one that is all that commonly known or used. I don’t see it in The Official Dictionary Poker by Michael Weisenberg, accessible online over at Mike Caro’s site. Nor does it appear in The Poker Encyclopedia compiled by Ethan Allan and Hannah Mackay.

Can’t recall exactly where I first encountered it. I know Anthony Holden uses the phrase in Big Deal, which is why I think of it as probably more of a British term — like calling a player a “punter” or the pot the “pool.” Early in the book, Holden describes starting out his year-long experiment as a poker professional with some losses, followed by a couple of cashes in small tourneys and “a run of cards in a £5-and-£10 Hold ’Em side game, which got my bankroll back to quits.”

The meaning of the phrase is clear enough, I assume — getting back to even. I like the way the phrase connotes that irrational feeling we’ve all had that makes recovering one’s starting stack a requirement for leaving the game.

We know it’s wrong to think this way. “Perhaps the stupidest words in poker are ‘I’ve got to get even,” writes Al Schoonmaker in Your Worst Poker Enemy. “When you feel that way, you are in danger of turning an unpleasant loss into a catastrophe,” explains the psychologist. “You can get further off balance, play more poorly or perhaps go to a larger game or the craps table, desperately trying to get even.”

Thus do I like calling it getting “back to quits” rather than getting even, because the phrase tends to remind me that my real goal is simply to leave the game — which perhaps I should consider going ahead and doing rather than pressuring myself to recoup my losses. In other words, realizing that I’m simply trying to get “back to quits” sometimes helps me get up from the table sooner — not always easy to do. (Wrote about that a couple of times before, actually, in “Poker Sisyphean Challenge” and “The Long Goodbye”).

I sometimes marvel at how this mindfulness of how much I am up or down perfectly evokes the existentialist idea of “making meaning” — in this case, interpreting the meaning of my play according to what is necessarily a wholly subjective criterion that only really matters to me. In fact, depending on how aware my opponents are, sometimes I might be the only one who even knows if I’m up or down. And even if others are aware, they haven’t a true idea what the significance of being up or down (by a lot or a little) means to me, anyway.

It was during another session of Rush Poker (pot-limit Omaha, six-handed, $25 buy-in) that I found myself thinking about all of these things once again. Despite playing a few hands well early on, I’d taken a couple of unfortunate beats, then made a couple of missteps to take me nearly two buy-ins down. I gradually fought back, and without winning any large pots managed to get almost “back to quits” before signing off.

As those who have played Rush Poker know, with each new hand you are taken to a new table. After a while, you do start to see the same players, and it is even possible to get reads and use them (especially if you are a note-taker). But a lot of what happens in each individual hand happens without the usual contextual info of the standard game.

I realized absolutely no one knew whether I was up or down during my session. In fact, towards the end I was sitting with a fairly big stack (nearly three buy-ins deep), but was still down a couple of bucks. Nor did anyone know if I’d been playing well or poorly.

A hand came up where it folded to me on the button and I raised pot with a trash hand. As I did, I momentarily thought of my “image” and its significance (or lack thereof). My opponents didn’t really know if I was the sort of player who sometimes would raise with bad cards there. But I did.

As I waited for the blinds to act, I began involuntarily thinking about how I’d played the last couple of times it had folded to me on the button, actually considering — and maybe even being slightly affected by — the patterns in my own play. Patterns I had noticed, but no one else had.

The existentialist recognizes that while we play with each other, what the game means is necessarily going to be different to each of the players. And if for you getting to the end means returning to the beginning, well, only you may see the meaning of within.

Related posts:

1. Play the Game Had one of those unbelievably unfortunate sessions of low…
2. Play the Game Had one of those unbelievably unfortunate sessions of low…
3. S.G.S. Gaming gets Nevada Licensing for its Two Cards High Poker Card Game S.G.S. Gaming announced last week that its Two Cards…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

For those who might have missed it, check out the comments to yesterday’s post in which I talked about that forthcoming article by Kyle Siler on the “Social and Psychological Challenges of Poker” in the Journal of Gambling Studies. In the comments you’ll see Kevmath pointing us to that Time magazine piece that also discusses the study. And Andy Bloch — who I’m gonna go ahead and suggest is probably better equipped to judge these things than I am — came by to offer some thoughts as well.

One of the ideas that comes up near the end of Siler’s piece has to do with the special psychological pressures that arise when a player moves up in stakes. All of us who have played the game know about these pressures. Any sort of change from one’s “normal” game — be it a change in stakes or an attempt to try a different game — usually brings with it some measure of uncertainty, and some of us are better equipped than others to handle those differences (e.g., in opponents’ skill levels, in opponents’ strategies, in the hands/odds/play of other games, etc.).

In fact, this phenomenon — basically of finding it difficult to perform well when outside of one’s comfort zone — occurred to me more than once yesterday.

Was thinking about it last night while watching my UNC Tarheels get blasted by the Clemson Tigers in a game at Clemson. The Heels looked miserable from the start, turning the ball over every other possession and falling behind by 20 within the first nine minutes. UNC finally got it together midway through the first half and managed to play the Tigers evenly for the rest of the night, which meant they ended the game on the losing side of a 83-64 final.

Carolina has a few seniors, but those guys don’t have a ton of experience, and much of the roster is filled out by freshmen and sophomores. While they are undefeated at home (11-0), they are now only 1-4 when not playing in the Dean Dome. Clearly having to leave Chapel Hill and get out of their comfort zone has negatively affected the young team thus far, as that poor start last night well showed.

Earlier in the day I’d been thinking about the same idea while reading Jay Greenspan’s book Hunting Fish (2006), loaned to me a little while ago by Special K. I’ve only just started the book, which, as the subtitle announces, is a chronicle of Greenspan’s “cross-country search for America’s worst poker players.” The book is organized into 18 chapters, each of which focuses on a particular stop on Greenspan’s journey through various casinos, underground clubs, and home games. So far so good.

Greenspan has to deal with a couple of different varieties of uncertainty as he travels from game to game. For one, his goal is to build his bankroll and move up in stakes, and already at the beginning of the book he’s starting to express self-doubt about whether or not he’ll eventually discover he cannot psychologically handle the pressure of moving up. “I understood that for me there would be a limit,” he writes, “a level at which I would say, I simply can’t play this high. The stakes are too much for me.”

Of course, Greenspan also has to deal with the uncertainty of playing in unfamiliar environs with unfamiliar opponents. Like UNC last night, he’s going to be the away team every single night, and so will have to get accustomed to dealing with unknowns and adapting accordingly.

There was one other instance yesterday when this phenomenon occurred to me — when I sat down for a short online session of my usual pot-limit Omaha game. When away from the tables, I almost always think about playing a different game. And sometimes I think about playing at higher stakes than the usual $25 buy-in games where I am most comfortable. But somehow, after I’ve logged in and opened up the lobby to find a game, I always go back to what’s familiar.

I know playing other games or higher stakes will challenge me as a player, thereby helping me to improve. But I also know that by sticking with my usual game/stakes my familiarity there serves me well, too, as my experience tends to give me an edge — sometimes modest, sometimes significant — over my opponents. I don’t always win, but I usually know what the hell is going on. Thus do I minimize (somewhat) the “social and psychological challenges” game provides.

Challenges are necessary, though. And paradoxical. We desire them, but shun them, too. We fear uncertainty, and perhaps a lot of times even consciously avoid situations in which we are confronted by uncertainty. But we know that a life without uncertainty isn’t desirable either.

Of that I’m certain.

Related posts:

1. Mixing It Up The truly greatest poker players have no one single…
2. The Familiar Struggle Had kind of a so-so November, poker-wise, ending the…
3. The Future of Poker Poker is a constantly evolving game, and in order…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Ooh, I left this here cup of coffee on the burner too long. Bitter. Gotta remember to grab that sucker more quickly next time.

For many, New Year’s Day is all about making resolutions, setting goals, and doing a general rethink of whatever it is about yr existence seems in need of such.

Well, maybe not right off. Could be all that important work of self-analysis comes later — after the effects of the previous evening’s let’s-party-like-there’s-no-tomorrow activities have sufficiently skedaddled, thereby allowing for relatively clear-headed cogitatin’.

I’ve certainly gone that route on January 1 numerous times. Might even be more tempting to do so here on the first day of the science-fictiony-sounding 2010 — a new decade. This-is-the-year-I’m-gonna… and then you fill in the blank. Or blanks.

Three years ago I kicked off the year writing about “Getting Off to a Good Start.” Was referring to something Barry Tanenbaum once wrote about beginning new sessions, but applied the idea as well to how one might approach any new stage in life.

Two years ago I began with a post titled “Looking Back & Looking Forward” in which I outlined a bunch of specific goals. Did accomplish some of those that year, but a couple got left behind pretty early on. One goal I set at the start of 2008 and did accomplish was the one of posting here every weekday, which I continued through last year, too. Not planning at the moment to deviate from that one in 2010.

Then I began 2009 writing about the “False Start” — the most frequently-called penalty in football, actually. There I suggested that false starts frequently happen at the poker tables, too. We’re excited just to be playing, and somehow it takes us a hand or ten to get our heads on straight and find our game.

Am a little too spent this year to do much more than look back at those earlier New Year posts. One reason is all the energy I put into a Betfair post, this one documenting the “Top Moments in Poker, 2000-2009.” Go check it out and let me know if I missed any of the biggies.

I will say this, though, as kind of a general introduction to 2010. I’m optimistic. Lots of reasons not to be, I suppose, if one has been reading any of those other, non-poker related “2000s in Review”-type articles over the last few days.

But I can’t help it. Like I say, I’m sitting here drinking this burnt-tasting cup of coffee, and while I should be grimacing, I can’t seem to get rid of this goofy grin.

Last year was a good one for me in terms of writing and poker, but I have higher expectations for this one. Am also anticipating other big “life stuff”-type changes in the new year, too, some of which I’ll chronicle here for sure.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll go get myself another cup of java. This one will be better.

Related posts:

1. Hard-Boiled Poker 2009 Year in Review (1 of 3) Wait a minute. You telling me it is almost…
2. Hard-Boiled Poker 2009 Year in Review (3 of 3) We are almost there. The last day of the year….
3. Hard-Boiled Poker 2009 Year in Review (3 of 3) We are almost there. The last day of the year….

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Was reading through the Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide: Tournament Edition the other day. A lot that is worthwhile in there, I think.

In Howard Lederer’s chapter on limit hold’em tourneys (one of the few discussion of LHE tourneys you’ll find, actually), he brings up a concept regarding tournaments that I remember Mike Caro at one time making a lot of noise about. Kind of a curious idea (as most of Caro’s ideas are).

Early in the chapter, Lederer extols the virtues of making it to the cash — and in fact ultimately makes simply cashing a primary goal for tourney players, kind of countering what a lot of folks will say about the importance of winning or finishing near the top where one usually finds the big money. He admits that he might have won more money in his career overall if he’d adopted a looser, more aggressive approach, but for him that was “not a style I’m comfortable playing.” This business of approaching tourneys conservatively is not the concept I want to talk about, though.

Amid that discussion, Lederer offers the observation that when you cash in a tournament, but don’t finish first, “you have, by definition, taken advantage of the tournament structure.” Why? “Because you ended up broke — zero chips — but they paid you a big check anyway.”

It’s kind of an interesting point, I think — this idea that, as Lederer goes on to say, “the winner actually is the one that pays the biggest price for the tournament structure,” because “the winner gets all the chips but does not get all the money.”

Like I say, this is an idea that I first saw Mike Caro address as what he calls a “conceptual problem” with tournaments. In Caro’s discussion, he points back to the mid-1970s when tourneys stopped being “winner-take-all” affairs and the prize pools began to be distributed among several of the top finishers, not just the winner.

The history of the World Series of Poker Main Event exemplifies this trend. For the first eight years of the WSOP (1970-1977), the winner of the Main Event won the entire prize pool. When Doyle Brunson won his second title in ’77, there were 34 entrants in the event, each of whom paid $10,000 to play. That meant Brunson’s first prize was $340,000.

However, in 1978 the WSOP began to divide up the prize pool. There were 42 entrants that year, and Bobby Baldwin won. But he only got $210,000 for winning, and the other half of the money was divided among those finishing second, third, fourth, and fifth.

Another big change in the payout schedule at the WSOP Main Event happened in 1986, the year Berry Johnston won the WSOP. There were nearly the same number of players in the Main Event in ’86 (141) as there were the previous year (140). However, in 1985 only the top nine finishers cashed, while in 1986 the top 36 players cashed (although those finishing 28th-36th got less than their buy-in back — $7,500). So Johnston’s first prize of $570,000 was considerably less than the $700,000 Bill Smith got the year before for winning.

For Caro, this change created a “conceptual problem” with tournaments insofar as the way he views it, “first place is punished and all other close finishers are rewarded.” For the Mad Genius of Poker, this makes tournaments much, much less attractive to him, and in fact becomes a reason for him not even to play them. He goes on to suggest that “in terms of strategy… if you play to win first place… you’ll probably lose money in the long run.”

Because if you win you lose. Get it?

Caro thus offers the same advice as Lederer and insists “the way to make a profit in these tournaments is to survive” — that is, play conservatively, try to make the cash, and be satisfied with knowing that when you do cash (but do not finish first) you have taken advantage of the structure. Ever the iconoclast, Caro probably takes the whole idea a bit too far when he adds that “you should not go out of your way to win the first-place trophy, because the winner of the tournament is penalized.” (Here’s an article in which Caro explains his idea, if you’re interested.)

I’ve heard him made this argument in other contexts, and he usually insists that finishing second is really where it’s at. The guy finishing second is the one who makes the most money despite losing all of his chips.

Now I’m no mad genius. (In fact, I’ve been known to have trouble operating a cell phone.) But I think the point being made by Caro and Lederer actually depends on a particular view of the relationship between tournament chips and buy-ins — namely, a view that essentially sees tournament chips as directly representing the money one paid to enter the tournament. Which sort of makes sense when we talk about tournaments in a theoretical way, but creates a different “conceptual problem” (I think) once we sit down and start playing the actual tournament.

For example, there’s gonna be somewhere around 5,000 players entering that $1,000 no-limit hold’em “stimulus special” tournament (Event No. 4) this year. Let’s just say exactly 5,000 enter. All players will be receiving 3,000 chips, meaning, in a sense, that every chip cost them 33.33 cents.

Of course, since some of the prize pool is going to be taken out before the first hand is dealt, you could say the players will already be getting the worst of it just by entering the tournament. According to the WSOP, 7% of the prize pool is going to be withheld for entry fees, and another 3% taken for the tourney staff. With 5,000 players, that means there is going to be 15 million chips in play. Players will have paid $5 million total, but the prize pool is going to be $4.5 million after the juice. That means every chip is technically worth exactly 30 cents, even though players paid 33.33 cents per chip to play. If we view tournament chips as the equivalent of cash, every player is going to be down $100 just for entering the tournament.

Now I’m going to guess somewhere around 9% of the field is going to cash in this event (judging from the payout schedules of similar, big field events from the 2008 WSOP). That’s 480 players. Not sure what the prize will be for first place, but last year Grant Hinkle took a little over 15% of the prize pool for winning that first no-limit hold’em event — the one that had nearly 4,000 enter. So let’s say the winner of the $1,000 “stimulus special” gets 15% of the prize pool for winning — that’s $675,000. That means the other $3,825,000 will go to 479 players who finish with zero chips. If we think of tournament chips as cash, well, then it does appear that 479 of the 5,000 players entering are getting a pretty good deal here.

But really, once the entry fee is paid, that $1,000 each player handed over is long gone. All that’s left are the 3,000 chips waiting at the player’s seat at the start of Day 1. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense (to me) to think any longer of those chips bearing any relationship at all to the money spent for them, because you can’t go back and cash them in. Once the tourney starts, the trick is to turn those chips into more chips, and hopefully all of the chips. That’s the only way to maximize their value from that point.

I understand Caro’s lament about tourneys moving away from the “winner-take-all” format. And I even appreciate the “conceptual problems” that result, thus making him less inclined to play tournaments. But I don’t think I’m going to buy the conclusion that the winner of a tournament is in some sense the biggest loser, even if it is the case that he or she has won all the chips but is only claiming a small portion of the prize pool.

But that’s my choice, of course. I can buy what I want — chips, concepts — as long as I can afford to do so.

Many have noted before how poker is a game that tends to reveal certain aspects of a person’s character. Players play according to so many different styles because, well, people are different. They view the world differently. They view themselves differently. And poker helps to make all those differences much more conspicuous.

A person comes to the table with certain ideas. Meets a group of others, all of whom have their own way of understanding this mortal coil about which we individually wind. They’re all exposed to that chance element — the cards — and how they differently respond provides the foundation for the ensuing conflict of ideas. Eventually, each starts to understand how the others look at things, with some picking up on such more quickly than others.

Anthony Holden described the phenomenon in Big Deal (1990) as follows: “Whether he likes it or not, a man’s character is stripped bare at the poker table; if the other players read him better than he does, he has only himself to blame. Unless he is both able and prepared to see himself as others do, flaws and all, he will be a loser in cards, as in life.”

Holden’s line gets quoted a lot, and while the leap from “loser in cards” to loser “in life” probably skips over a few necessary steps, it does nevertheless make a valid point. A big part of one’s success in poker has to do with seeing oneself as clearly and accurately as others do. You can’t win if others understand what you are doing better than you do. Which happens — to all of us when we first start to play poker, and to most of us even after we’ve been playing for a long while. We get lazy, we stop paying attention to ourselves, we stop paying attention to how others are seeing our “character stripped bare.” And when that happens, we lose. Usually.

Sorry to be so abstract here, but I’m getting to a sort of mini-epiphany I had over the last few days that concerns both my poker playing style and my character, generally speaking.

I am probably best classified as one of those “creatures of habit” types who generally has a hard time changing my routine once I find something that I like or at least is comfortable enough to endure without too much hardship. That’s not to say I am not able to adapt to changes that go on around me, but rather that I myself am less inclined to introduce such changes if not forced to do so.

This character trait gets illustrated in various ways, some relatively trivial, some not. For example, a less important manifestation of my resistance to change might be found in how I choose to negotiate my 25-mile commute to work. I take the same path every day, avoiding the interstate and its high-speed intensities and instead opting for the relatively tranquil state roads where I tool along at 45 per. After several years of construction, a new loop was added to the interstate several months ago that I have heard would cut a few minutes off of my commute, should I take it. But I haven’t even tried it. I’m just not interested.

A more meaningful example of my resistance to change would be that other path — the career one — that I chose a long time ago and have similarly stuck to for a good while now.

The poker writing has now become a not insignificant detour from that one for me, taking me to Las Vegas last summer to cover the WSOP, and allowing me to leave that same old, tedious main road for longer and longer stretches. I may well be going back to the WSOP this summer, and am starting to think more and more about whether or not I even want to return to the main road. Not quite ready to make that decision, but Vera and I have been talking more and more about the possibility of my doing so.

My resistance to change manifests itself in my poker playing, too — to my detriment, I’m afraid. For one, I tend to pick one game and stick to it in an almost obsessive (or superstitious) way, even though I know switching up would likely keep my poker instincts sharper in all games. I also tend to have a hard time moving around stakes-wise, especially if I’m extracting a modest win rate wherever I happen to be. Kind of limits my ever seeing what exactly I’m capable of doing, poker-wise.

The most harmful effect of resisting change at the poker table, though, is that others can “see” you much more quickly and clearly than they can otherwise. And, making matters worse, you tend not to pay attention to yourself, either. It’s easy in any game to turn predictable and make your patterns of raises, continuation bets, checks, and folds become blatantly apparent to others. Gotta be ready and willing to change it up, and often, since doing so increases your own understanding of yourself, and tends to decrease others’ understanding. And when that happens, you win. Usually.

Anyhow, one thing ain’t gonna change, and that is I’ll keep you updated here on all of the changes.