If you would, please.

Hey, I never ask anyone to do anything in this blog but I'm asking you now to help out here. If you scroll down on the right you'll see a widget I added from Barack Obama's voteforchange.org. Rumor has it that Mr. President elect plays a mean game of poker. I'm asking you to take a few minutes of your time and help support the cause for getting online poker's status changed.

It seems silly to me that the NFL has a carve out to keep Fantasy Football legal (which is actually gambling), as well as Interstate Lotteries ( which is serious gambling if you look at the odds of winning), and Horse Racing (um, you guessed it....gambling) but online poker is made out to be the big bad wolf on the internet.

There is more skill involved in poker than randomly picking some numbers on a lottery sheet, or guessing which quarterback is going to light it up this week. So out of all the gambling games mentioned above we have exemptions for the ones that a monkey could do and your odds of winning would be the same.

Now let's say the monkey was playing $1/$2 No Limit Texas Hold Em with $200 and had Ac,Kc pre-flop and is up against a player who plays 40% of his hands. He bets $10 and the monkey calls. He's already a 66% favorite against the other guy's range of hands. (Examples below, courtesy of Poker Stove)


Text results appended to pokerstove.txt

765,399,888 games 1.562 secs 490,012,732 games/sec

Board:
Dead:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 66.445% 64.70% 01.74% 495236094 13336967.50 { AcKc }
Hand 1: 33.555% 31.81% 01.74% 243489859 13336967.50 { 44+, A2s+, K2s+, Q4s+, J7s+, T7s+, 97s+, 87s, A3o+, K7o+, Q8o+, J8o+, T9o }

Let's take it further. Suppose the flop comes up Ah 5c 8c and the monkey is faced with an all in bet from the opponent. Should he fold? If he does he is making a critical mistake since he is now a 91% favorite in the hand.

Text results appended to pokerstove.txt

372,240 games 0.046 secs 8,092,173 games/sec

Board: Ah 5c 8c
Dead:

equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 91.213% 90.59% 00.62% 337208 2325.00 { AcKc }
Hand 1: 08.787% 08.16% 00.62% 30382 2325.00 { 44+, A2s+, K2s+, Q4s+, J7s+, T7s+, 97s+, 87s, A3o+, K7o+, Q8o+, J8o+, T9o }

The point of this is to let you non-poker playing readers know you can calculate your odds of winning a poker hand in any situation by reading your cards and seeing what kind of odds the pot is offering you. If the price is wrong you fold. If it is right you must play the hand because, if you've done your homework on the game, mathematically you'll win in the long run by making sound decisions.

Poker is the only game on the UIGEA list where this is possible.

Sweat Session

Um, no, I didn't work out although I need to start again. I had a sweat session with LaffyTaffy22 from Poker Dynasty and it went really well. I think he hit on some key areas where my game has improved already since I really haven't played No Limit (NL) in a while. Most of these things may be small but when you're rusty and your confidence is shaky it's good to hear them coming from a really good player.


Within a few hands we changed tables to target some bigger fish which I've been trying to do more frequently as table selecction (and seat selection for that matter) is extremely important nowadays.

My blind stealing attempt percentage has improved. The theory that if your opponent isn't going to 3 bet you when you're stealing means you can use any two cards for it and shut down when he plays back really paid off.

I've never really been a big fan of check raising flops in NL since I tend to c-bet almost every single pot I open raise but Laffy found a few spots to do this and it boosted my stack a bit. We also talked about ramping up my aggression in post-flop spots where I would normally shut down. Another important thing that came up was to not let myself get in marginal situations to reduce some of the variance that happens in this beautiful game. Oh, and I "obviously need to run better" as shown in the hand below. This guy was a huge calling station with stats of 57/8/.5

Here's the Poker Stove analysis on the turn:

Text results appended to pokerstove.txt
44 games 0.032 secs 1,375 games/sec
Board: Qc 5s 3c Th
Dead:
equity win tie pots won pots tied
Hand 0: 81.818% 81.82% 00.00% 36 0.00 { 5c5d }
Hand 1: 18.182% 18.18% 00.00% 8 0.00 { Tc6c }

Clearly the only time I'm folding here is if my internet connection disconnects me :)







LaffyTaffy, thanks again for helping out a lowly donk like myself and I hope we can do something like this in the future. Good luck on the felt and may the good cards hit your hand.