Equity of that K5

I thought I'd look at that button call with the K5s and 6 callers in front of you (with on raise) in some more detail.

Using pokerstove, if the raiser is raising with the top 20% of his hands and the other callers are playing the top 60% of their hands then the K5s has equity of about 13.5%, the callers 13.6% and the raiser 18.5%.

To make a call worthwhile based on pot equity alone the hero would need about 14.3%. But with the added value of the button, at that point you're actually in think about raise territory.

If the kicker was a little better, say a K8s, the hero's equity is about 13.9, the other callers 13.5. Still in the call territory.

What about A5s? It's worth a raise just based on equity. Against that 60%/20% lineup the A5s has 16% equity, the callers 13.2% and the raiser 17.8%. This is an example of a situation where you don't have to think you have the best hand for it to be worth a raise on value alone, you don't need to try to reduce the field to make it worth a raise, in fact you don't want to reduce the field.

How about pair? That's a hand Mason said he'd call with. A 66 is worth a raise here. It's in even better shape (just slighly) than the A5s.

Tony Spilotro is the person that the character played by Joe Pesci in the movieCasino is based on.

The FBI has released their files on him.

I only read about 110 pages of the 280 page file before I got bored and quit reading. It has a lot of redaction, a lot of reduntancy. I didn't see anything about poker. It has some stuff about his invovledment in a murder attempt, in fixing a horse race (that part is so heavily redacted you can't figure out what they're talking about), his Las Vegas fencing activities, and sports betting. It's all pretty superficial.

But if you really can't find anything to do one afternoon you might want to download it. If you see anything actually interesting in it, let me know.

Online poker room cultures

The Poker Chronicles has a nice post about historical changes in market supremacy among online poker rooms.

I find it odd and somewhat disheartening that Paradise Poker is switching to Boss Media's network. It sort of marks the end of an era in online poker, just like Kmart going bankrupt did for retail. I remember playing on Dise back when it had first opened and the only real competitor was Planet Poker. Their software was so much better, even for those of us who didn't know that Planet Poker's shuffle had been taken advantage of, that it was practically in a different league. It was what made me believe that some day online poker might be almost as good as the real thing.

I don't have quite the same emotional attachment to the downfall of Paradise, but it interesting to look at the ups and downs of individual poker rooms. One of the things that's changed in the poker world is the concept of celebrity. What made a poker celebrity 10 years ago isn't what makes a poker celebrity today. Poker rooms that understand that have done well, those that didn't understand if fell by the wayside.

Online poker started with Planet Poker. The main thing they provided was being first. The software was clunky, their software maintenance was not user-friendly (they had complete shutdown every Tuesday morning for maintenance.) They really didn't have much going for them. But they were first and they thrived. When online poker people said PP you knew they meant Planet Poker.

Then came Paradise Poker. What they offered was clean looking and clean operating software. Planet Poker responding to the better product by hiring two celebrity spokespersons -- Mike Caro and Roy Cooke. Both derived their celebrity from writing for Card Player Magazine. In those days Card Player Magazine was the poker magazine market, and the magazine strongly featured it's writers.

Today that market is a little different. Card Player isn't only part of the market and almost all poker magazines these days feature players seen on TV, not the writer's. Poker writer's aren't the celebrities they were in the past. That movement away from featuring writer's and featuring players started with June Field when she established Poker Digest and put players on the cover as opposed to Card Player who always put casinos on the cover. Card Player tried to stem the competition by buying Poker Digest, but the market was destined to grow way to fast for them to maintain a stranglehold on it.

Planet Poker's attempt to compensate for an inferior product by using celebrity flopped. They just kept losing market share.

But Paradise Poker also failed to respond adequately to competition. For a while the term PP no longer meant Planet Poker, it meant Paradise Poker. But that didn't last long. Party Poker came along showing a high degree of competence in promotion. They established strong affiliates, they had high player bonuses (funded by high rakes). Then when poker hit TV they hit it with ads. They succeeded in a huge way. It was all about promotion.

An underfunded room, Poker Spot, came along and tried to establish a niche by copying Party Poker's high player bonuses and combining it with tournaments. They were the first room to offer tournaments. But, it's harder to get away with very large rakes in tournaments and they quickly found that the high player bonuses didn't self fund without high rakes. They flopped in a big way.

But Poker Stars did succeed with their tournament offerings. Chris Moneymaker helped establish them as a new brand of poker celebrity -- a TV celebrity.

TV makes a huge difference in the value of celebrity. Something Planet Poker didn't last long enough to figure out.