Today's Gambling Music

Kentucky Gambler, Merle Haggard

Poker and cheating

I haven't blogged much about the cheating scandal at Absolute Poker, in fact I'm not sure I've blogged about it at all. Mostly because I think blogging about it is pretty much pointless. The attitude of poker rooms everywhere (online and offline) about cheating is that it's best to just ignore it and it will someday go away.

Of course it won't go away, it will always be with us, another reason I think it's almost pointless to blog about it.

An example of they typical attitude about cheating is something that happened at the Coushatta Grand in Kinder right after they opened a few years ago. I was in a 20/40 game and I suspected a player I didn't know of holding out cards. Without going into details of why I thought that (it was a conclusion I came to after a couple hours of observing him and others in the game) I even thought I knew what he was holding out, I thought he was holding out a queen.

I told the floorman my suspicions and asked if he could put a camera on the guy or otherwise watch him.

I don't remember the guys name, although when I later told this story to others in places like Biloxi, New Orleans, Shreveport, and Tunica they knew who he was and told me his name. Let's call him Billy-Bob.

The floorman said, "Oh, that's Billy-Bob, I know all about the stuff he used to pull in private games but I talked to him and he promised me he wouldn't cheat in my room".

That's the typical cardroom attitude about cheating.

I'm glad to see that Lou Krieger is trying to keep the Absolute Poker cheating story alive, but I think it's a futile effort.

When the thrill is gone

In the first post I made about Brian Townsend's blog I said it was a window into a different world. As I read more and more of it I think that the world he's living in isn't the same world I originally thought it was.

When I wrote that first post I didn't know who the guy was. Since then I've read some of his background

He is 25 and recently completed his degree in electrical engineering from University of California-Santa Barbara.

Okay, he's some young guy. But that doesn't really explain his money or why he's playing poker. The next part of his bio does though.

Brian has been playing poker professionally since September 2006. He began playing poker in August 2005. Initially playing .25/.50 limit holdem, Brian quickly moved up the limit ranks to the larger limit games before switching to no limit in the beginning of 2006. From there, he moved up from the smallest no limit games to the largest no limit games in the world in under a year.

He's a craps player who keeps letting it ride. That explains a lot.

Brain Townsend's Blog

Brian Townsend is some sort of high-rolling player on Full-Tilt who's been playing the "Big Game" at the Bellagio during the WSOP.

I don't know much about the guy, and just started reading his blog a few weeks ago. It's certainly interesting.

Million dollar swings (recently 3 million), having $150,000 in your online account is "playing short money". It's a window into a different world.

If you read his blog regularly I think it's also a peak into how a gambler with a lot of money is a very different kind of person than the typical rich person.

I don't think Warren Buffet would react to losing a few hundred thousand dollars in the same way Brian Townsend does. I think that's because he looks at money from a totally different perspective.

If Brian Townsend left a million dollars on the table he'd shrug it off, saying, I've got a 100 million, I've got plenty more where that came from. He thinks in terms of how meaningful that money is to his bankroll, how meaningful it is to him personally.

A really rich person, like Warren Buffet, tends to think of money in terms of what it can do. Not in terms of whether or not he needs it. That's a very different viewpoint and it causes very different types of money-related behaviors.

When you see gamblers talk about how competitive they are I don't think they think of competitiveness in terms of accomplishments. Not in terms of actually doing something, but more in terms of what it gets them. The difference might be subtle, but I don't think it's a small difference. I think it's pretty big.

Here's an RSS feed for the last 10 blog entries at Brian Townsend's Blog

Poker, Backgammon, and gamblers

Today it's the World Series of Poker Results that dominates the interest of most poker players. Poker has become less a part of the gambling world and more a part of the world of amateur competition.

Poker used to be about gambling, and the gambling lifestyle was not the same as today's tournament lifestyle. Today poker players will travel long distances for a shot at getting on TV. It used to be that poker players would travel long distances for a shot at playing in a good game, it didn't even have to be a poker game.

Back in the 1970's Norm Zadah published an article in the academic journal Operations ResearchNorman Zadeh (1977) Computation of optimal poker strategies, Operations Research 25, 541-561. giving a game theory solution to the first round of betting in draw poker. I was a graduate student (Mark Goodfriend) at the time, at Northwestern. Myself and another grad student who was also interested in gambling noticed an error in the article. Not a mathematical error, but an error in modeling.

He assumed that an optimal strategy would be to open with all hands H > H^* where the relation > is based on a poker hand ranking. It turns out that's not true. Poker value before the draw isn't determined by poker hand ranking but by a probability distribution of possible final hand rankings. Sometimes a really strong draw is a better hand than a mediocre made hand.

It also turns out that in the case of draw poker, if the ante is very small relative to the bet size then the model works if you make the assumption he made, that with a very small antes it's never worth it to play a draw if only first round betting is considered (if you ignore implied odds).

Mark and I wrote up a comment on this, showing that his model doesn't find optimal first round strategies because he makes a faulty assumption about the mathematical form of the optimal strategy. Our main point was that poker math should be as much about poker as it is about math, maybe even more so. Back then operations research models of gambling got more attention within the operations research field than they do today, and there were a couple of sessions devoted exclusively to gambling.

Because of our presentation Mark and I ended up having some conversations with Tom Cover. Most of y'all probably never heard of him, but he teaches at Stanford and has done a bunch of research over the years in gambling related probability models.

I didn't actually play poker much back then, and the chance to talk to a well known math dweeb who did made an impression on me. During one of those conversations Tom mentioned that he'd pretty much given up poker for Backgammon. In the 60's and early 70's Tom had played a lot of poker, even flying to NYC once a month just to sit in on a private game hosted by Oswald Jacoby, who was pretty well known as a poker contributor (I don't mean that in a flattering way). Then when Tom discovered a Backgammon contributor across the bay at Berkley who not only never won he never gave up, he gave up on those transcontinental flights.

Gambling 30 years ago wasn't about winning tournaments and getting on TV, it was about finding a good game. These days getting on TV can pay off better than any gambling game is going to.