Thursday, January 31, 2013

“Can I Spread My Legs Around the Button?” Part 1

I never figured I’d ever encounter a more outrageous woman at a poker table than my dear friend Prudence.  Now, truth be told, Prudence hasn’t been all that much “Prudence” lately, due a reduction in both her alcohol consumption and her poker playing of late.  Of course, the most recent post from Grange (see here) proves that there are exceptions to every rule. 

But earlier this week, while playing at BSC, I played with a woman who made Prudence—and I mean the early, inebriated Prudence of say, this post here—look like the school librarian who would give you the big “shush” if you ever even whispered.
I have no idea this lady’s name, but we’ll need to give her one.  So I’ll call her Natalee for reasons which will be explained later.
I had only been at the table for an orbit or two and was still trying to get a feel for the players and the action when a seat opened up and a thin, middle aged woman was escorted to the empty seat.  To say she changed the dynamic at the table would be a gross understatement.
As she took her seat and bought in for $100, she was given the option of coming on the next hand or waiting two hands and come in behind the button.  She chose to wait.  As the dealer tossed a “reserve” button in her spot to indicate that she wouldn’t be getting a card this hand, she asked if that meant she did something wrong.  And she sorta fixated on that.
“Did I do something wrong?  What did I do wrong?  You know, I’ve been playing blackjack all day.”  She said that as if it was going to explain her actions.  It struck me as odd, but she was merely getting started. 
She saw a floor person walk by and asked if she had done anything wrong, and repeated that she had been playing blackjack all day.  The floor insisted she had done nothing wrong.  Yet, anyway.
Her first hand, someone raised to $15.  She looked at her cards and said, “I’m suited, so I’m gonna call.”  I don’t remember the exact play of the hand, but she either called or made some fairly large bets, and won the pot with 2 pair, Jacks & 8’s.  But she hadn’t lied.  Her Jack-8 were both hearts.
She was still somewhat fixated on what she had done wrong, and when she asked the dealer a question about the next hand, she then said, “I’m sorry I ask a lot of questions.  I’m a Jewish woman.”  I really didn’t see the connection, but one of the guys who was about to go on tilt responded, “You don’t look that Jewish.  You look more Vegas.”
I guess I was a bit put off by that comment (see here).  But I sensed something well out of the ordinary poker session was about to happen, so I didn’t say anything.
She wouldn’t stop talking.  If I had a dime for every time she told us she’d spent all day playing blackjack, I would be able to play in Bobby’s Room.  Once or twice she also mentioned that she had lost a lot of money playing the blackjack.
But she was also talking about the poker.  And every hand she had.  “I got a piece of that, so I’ll call.”  “I have a good hand, so I’ll raise.”  “I’m suited, so I’ll raise.”  With every decision, she would comment.  I think she pretty much crossed over the line of talking about the hand, but I guess she didn’t go quite far enough past it to get warned about it.  She verbally reacted to any bet or any raise someone else made, asking what they could possibly have, or revealing that she had a pair, or two pair, or whatever.
And when she wasn’t telling us about her day of playing blackjack, she took to telling us she was in “relapse.”  I thought at first she meant “rehab” but no, she kept saying she was in relapse.
Her non-stop chatter of course got some reactions from the other players.  She was in seat 7, I was in Seat 1.  The three guys to my immediate left had all seemed friendly enough before Natalee showed up, and were getting along swimmingly with each other.  Suddenly seats 2 & 4 were headed for tilt, as was an older gentleman in seat 9.  Truth be told, I have never in my poker life seen a player put so many other players on tilt so fast.  Within 5 minutes these guys were already tilting.
Some of that had to do with the poker, which I’ll get to shortly.  But a lot of it had to do with her overbearing personality, her non-stop talking, the nature of her comments, and frankly, her rather unpleasant voice.  The guy in seat 2, who was from Wyoming, in particular got into verbally jousting with her from across the table.  Her dress had stripes, so he asked if she was a leopard, then realized his error and said, “I mean tiger, I guess it would be a tiger.”
She replied, “Tiger?  No, I’m a cougar.”  Then, just to make sure we knew that wasn’t an unintentional joke, she added, “I like younger men.”  Wyoming said she was too young to be a cougar, but she indicated that she was older than he apparently thought.
By now, only one thought was going through my mind.
Blog post!  
Truly, a “woman said” blog post was happening before my eyes.
She was wearing ear buds and frequently would ask questions saying she couldn’t hear what was said, and then would tell us she had ear buds in her ears.  But she rarely took them out.  And when she started getting some hostility from some of the players, she would tell us she was going to tune us out and that she was listening to Eminem.  She didn’t really look like an Eminem fan, if you know what I mean.  One time she told us she was now listening to Frank Sinatra, causing me to comment that Eminem and Sinatra were an unusual combination.  But the guy in seat 3 said it sounded like his play list, so maybe it wasn’t that strange.
Finally the dealer button came around to her.  She said, “Oh goody!  I’ve got the button.”  Then she asked the dealer, “Can I spread my legs around the button?”

That got everyone’s attention, and then she added something about liking to straddle.  So it was her rather unique way of asking if she could button straddle.
Wyoming had already had his fill of her, so he said, possibly loud enough for her to hear, “Ugh, that button would be so sticky, and so stinky, it would be disgusting.”
She had a beer in front of her and I don’t remember if she brought it with her when she took her seat or if she ordered it once she got there.  But when the waitress came around to take orders, the waitress told her that wouldn’t bring her another drink.  She was certainly acting like she might be drunk, but I couldn’t rule out just plain crazy as a viable alternative.  The Shift Manager came over and told her that she wouldn’t be getting another alcoholic beverage until the bottom of the hour, which was a bit over 30 minutes away.  Besides, as he correctly pointed out, she still had more than half of her beer remaining.  She gave some explanation of why she wanted another beer brought to her now, which I couldn’t hear, but essentially, she was cut off for at least the next half an hour.
Let’s talk about the poker.  Before she showed up, I sensed that this was a rather aggressive, action table.  But her presence really upped the ante in that regard, almost immediately.  She played almost every hand, called almost every preflop raise, and made a lot of raises herself.  Seeing the hands she was playing, I can tell you two things for sure.  One, she was a terrible player, calling raises she had no business calling time and time again.  And two, she was a major, major luckbox.  She was having the run of her life.  In less than a half an hour, she had run up that $100 buy in to $500, and she was just getting started.
It was the combination of her refusal to ever shut up, along with her amazing ability to suck out on the other players, that put so many of the players on tilt so fast.  She would keep calling bets and raises when way behind, and would somehow, some way, catch the exact card she needed to win the pot.  The original guy in seat 4 was a nice guy who was pleasantly chatting with seat 3 and Wyoming when I got to the table.  Suddenly, he was in a hand with her and raised her on the flop.  It was something like 10-5-4.  She said, “What are doing that for?  What, you got a set of 4’s, is that it?  What if I’ve got a set of 5’s?  Did you think about that?”  And she shoved.  This was early in her run and Seat 4 had her covered.  He called.  She said, “Well, I don’t have a set of 5’s, but I’ve got something.”
Yeah, she had 5-something, so a pair of 5’s. And of course she caught her second pair on the river and the guy just gave her a look of total hatred and mucked. I assume he had at least a pair of 10’s, or an overpair.
This put seat 4 totally on tilt, and he didn’t say another word while there—to anybody.  Even as his new pals in seats 2 & 3 tried to console him, he sat there in total silence and just stared at Natalee.  He got into it with her two more times, giving her stoned cold silence and a total death stare as she babbled on about her hand and speculated on his.  And she took all his money, playing crap cards and hitting whatever she needed to take the pot.
Natalee definitely noticed the “if looks could kill” expression on this guy’s face.  So she said to him, “I know you want to Van der Sloot me right now.”
Seat 4 said nothing.  I honestly don’t think he was capable of speech right then.  But a bunch of us laughed, and a couple of guys asked or wondered what the hell that meant.  It seems Van der Sloot is old news and nobody but me could remember the guy who was accused of murdering poor Natalee Holloway.  I knew the reference and knew what she meant, but I couldn’t recall his apparent victim’s name until I looked it up later.  But seeing as how she was using Van der Sloot’s name as a verb to accuse seat 4 of wanting to kill her, I decided to give the star of this post the pseudonym “Natalee”, spelled the same way the victim did.
Here’s the thing.  With both this guy and a couple of other guys, even with her incredible luck, the hands she was hitting weren’t that good, generally.  Guys were betting big with pretty mediocre hands apparently (they never showed), playing right into her hands.  What a stupid plan.  It was clear that she was pretty much going to call every bet, so trying to bet her off a hand was like pissing into the wind.  And seeing how lucky she was at the moment, these guys were just throwing money at Natalee as if she was the world’s sexiest stripper, which she was so very clearly not.
Speaking of strippers, at one point, after taking a boatload of money from one of the guys on tilt by hitting some ridiculous draw, she said, “Sorry about that.  I guess I should buy you a lapdance.”  She did say “buy” and not “give.”  Phew.
As for me, well, within a few minutes of Natalee coming to the table, I knew that I was not going to be able to concentrate on the poker while she was there.  You may be wondering why, if I knew that to be the case, I didn’t ask for a table change.  Isn’t the reason obvious?  I didn’t move for you, my dear readers.  I did it for this blog post.  So what if I was giving up on a chance to play real poker and win real money.  I knew I would get a good blog post out of this session.  Nothing is too good for my loyal readers.
I was paying more attention to Natalee’s comments and her outrageous behavior than the poker, but I was following enough about the poker to quickly figure out how to play in this situation.  With Natalee being so loose-aggressive and so many players going on tilt because of her presence—playing even crazier and more aggressive than they ordinarily would—I knew that the only way to play was to be extremely tight.  I’m a tight player anyway, but now I became uber-tight.  I wasn’t going to play any speculative hands, any borderline hands.  No, I was going to wait for a true premium hand to play.  That’s the only way to play at a table full of maniacs and that’s what this table was.  As it turned out, I was totally card dead anyway, and I didn’t really get a hand that I’d play under more normal circumstances, especially with a raise in front of me.  And there was almost always a raise in front of me.
Wyoming was already on tilt when he got into a preflop raising war with Natalee.  Now as I said, she was raising a lot preflop (but rarely, if ever, 3 betting), and with very light holdings.  I believe on this hand, Natalee made the first raise, Wyoming made a big re-raise, Natalee re-raised and Wyoming shoved, she called.  I may have the order backwards.  Wyoming was so happy, he was sure he had trapped her, and revealed his hand.  Yes, it was, of course the dreaded pocket Kings.  He was sure that based on her play to that point he had her crushed.
Not this time.  Of course, she turned over two Aces.  Nothing on the board hit either of them, and Wyoming was stacked, about $300 lost to her.  But here’s the thing.  There’s no doubt in my mind that if the hands had been reversed, and she had the KK, she would have caught a king on the board (or a lucky straight or flush).  That’s the way her luck was running.
Although Wyoming was still kind of joking around, even after getting stacked with his cowboys, he was demonstrating pretty blatant hostility towards Natalee.  He was calling her a bitch (or “biatch”), calling her ugly, saying he hated her, loud enough for her to hear.  She didn’t react, at least initially.  Later she said something like, “You’re treating me this way because I’m a woman.  I’m a woman.  I’m an abused woman.”
Wyoming responded, “I can see why.”
I guess that may have been the reason for a comment she made a little later when they got into it again.  She bet $10 on a hand and he raised it to $30.  She couldn’t see how much so she asked the dealer, and before she heard the answer, she continued, “How many inches is that?  Is that an inch?  Is it about an inch you’ve got there?”  I’m pretty sure she wasn’t asking about the dimensions of the poker chips. 
Wyoming just laughed and said, “Oh, an inch is way more than I’ve got.”  And then he proceeded to lose more money to Natalee.
Another time, he bet or raised and Natalee thought about it for awhile and then said, “You’re full of caca.  You need a laxative.  I raise.”  She won that hand, too.
The guy originally in seat 4, who may still not be capable of speech yet, was replaced with a guy visiting Vegas from Germany, so let’s call him Dirk.  Dirk was very much the stereotypical Aggro Euro.  In other words, he was the perfect prey for Natalee.  He had only been at the table for a short time when this hand happened, but that was more than long enough for any even half way observant player to figure out what kind of player Natalee was.
He raised preflop on the button after a bunch of limpers came in, and of course Natalee called.  All that meant is that she had two cards.  The flop came something like Q-9-4, rainbow.  I think there might have been a bet and a raise, and then Dirk shoved.  I guess he had about $200.  Natalee, by this time sitting behind a stack of at least $1,000, thought for a bit and finally called, saying, “I need help.”
Of course, there was no doubt that she would get the help she needed.  Except this time, she didn’t need it.  Dirk kindly turned over his cards.  King-3.  Yeah, it was a stone cold bluff.  Against a player who couldn’t possibly be bluffed!  It may have been the single dumbest move I’ve ever seen in a poker game.  Natalie showed her pocket 3’s and to the surprise of no one at the table, they held up.
Rather than realize that his own play had been monumentally stupid, he proceed to bitch and moan about Natalee’s horrible call there. True, it was a horrible call.  But Natalee had run up a $100 buy in to $1000 making exactly those kind of horrible calls for the past hour.  So Dirk called Natalee’s call stupid, and then asked if her name was “Stupid.”  She ignored that, at least at first.
And that’s all for part 1.  Despite all the complaints I get about doing posts that are too short, I’m going to stop it here and pick up the story in the following post.  In the second part, you’ll get to read about what happened when crazy Natalee got into a hand with me!  See here.

32 comments:

  1. "But she was also talking about the poker. And every hand she had. “I got a piece of that, so I’ll call.” “I have a good hand, so I’ll raise.” “I’m suited, so I’ll raise.” With every decision, she would comment. I think she pretty much crossed over the line of talking about the hand, but I guess she didn’t go quite far enough past it to get warned about it. She verbally reacted to any bet or any raise someone else made, asking what they could possibly have, or revealing that she had a pair, or two pair, or whatever."

    Oh, she was Tony's long-lost twin sister!

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    1. LOL! I hadn't made the connection but, get this, when you see the second part, you'll see that's there a nothing similarity between Natalee and Tony. And it has nothing to do with mashed potatoes.

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  2. " Truth be told, I have never in my poker life seen a player put so many other players on tilt so fast. Within 5 minutes these guys were already tilting.
    Some of that had to do with the poker, which I’ll get to shortly. But a lot of it had to do with her overbearing personality, her non-stop talking, the nature of her comments, and frankly, her rather unpleasant voice."

    As I said....

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    1. Sorry I didn't approve this comment until just now, it was an accident, I didn't see the email, it got "lost" in between the other two comments you made.

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  3. "I knew that the only way to play was to be extremely tight. I’m a tight player anyway, but now I became uber-tight. I wasn’t going to play any speculative hands, any borderline hands. No, I was going to wait for a true premium hand to play. That’s the only way to play at a table full of maniacs and that’s what this table was."

    Wrong, wrong, wrong.

    The correct adjustment is the other direction: You loosen up. Not as much as they do, but more than your usual. The keys are simply that (1) your average starting hand is stronger than theirs, and (2) you're better at reading and acting on post-flop situations than they are. (If this isn't true, leave the table immediately. Seriously.)

    For starters, see last few paragraphs of this post: http://goo.gl/Bva2o

    But also consider what situation you're creating by playing ultra-tight: Your opponents can put you on a very narrow range of hands when you do finally enter a pot, but you have no idea what cards they hold. Sure, you start with an equity advantage, but you have almost no deceptive power. They, on the other hand, can shuck and jive, bob and weave. If they play back at you after the flop, you have to just guess whether they hit the board hard or are bluffing (because they know you're an ideal bluffing target). You really can't rule out very many hands from their ranges. This puts you at a severe disadvantage. They can put you to much harder decisions than you can put them. They are in a better position to play perfectly against you than you are against them.

    Of course your variance will be sky-high, but that's almost always the case. I.e., the highest-profit situations are nearly always the highest-risk situations, too.

    Finally, consider that the chips are flying back and forth across the table. Rather than enter the fray and claim your fair share of them--or more--you are sitting back and not profiting.

    To put this in terms that you'll understand, it's as if you're at a party at the Playboy Mansion, and instead of taking advantage of the bounty, you crawl off in a corner and cover your eyes. "No, no--there's TOO MANY beautiful women here. I can't handle it. When they've all left except maybe one or two, then I'll come out and have a drink and chat. But right now I couldn't possibly allow myself to interact with so many bikini-clad nubile bodies."

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    1. Thanks Grump. First off, your analogy there is priceless. Just hysterical. Although, if it was the Playboy Mansion, wouldn't the women be topless? I would hope so.

      As for your thoughts, well, I always appreciate your thoughtful poker analysis. I hope I can still count on getting such great feedback after you move to NC. And as you can see, you've sparked some interesting debate.

      That does leave me a bit perplexed, because I thought I was doing a sleazy "woman said" post and somehow a poker post broke out.

      I definitely see your point, and perhaps I should have tried harder to look for opportunities. I will certainly remember that next time I'm sitting with a table full of maniacs.

      I did read the post you referenced and enjoyed it. I can say however that I have read much advice to the contrary. In fact, a WSOP bracelet winner I know personally has told me that he always tries to play tight when the table is loose, and loose when the table is tight.

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  4. I disagree with Grump, but then again I'm a n00b so maybe someone could tell me why I'd be wrong:

    Let's say Rob opens his range and calls at a wild table with A9. If the flop comes Ace high, he might be stuck in a very tough spot against these maniacs. Ditto something like 10J suited on a 10 high flop.

    However, if Grump interprets a wider range as something like 89 off on the button so that Rob sees the flop and hope for a Yahtzee, then I do in fact echo his sentiments.

    But that's enough about cards. I'm more interested in the line "she was given the option of coming on the next hand." If she can do that on command, my hats off to her!

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    1. Great comment on my little typo there! Now I can't correct it because your response is too good. But you know, if Natalee ever had a problem getting off, I'm sure her excuse would be, "I've been playing blackjack all day."

      Frigid poker player, huh? I never would have put you on that!

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  5. Fabulous, just fabulous, I can't wait for the next installment. I too, disagree with Grump. Pre-flop this game was playing very much like a low limit game. (a 10 p.m. game not one of those rock gardens at 10 a.m). Tightening up was a good strategy. You had the benefit of the cloak of invisibility. The other players may have had the opportunity to play perfectly against you but it is unlikely they would even notice you were in the hand. They were out to get Natalee and so long as she was in the hand nobody was going to notice you or even think about what you might have. I doubt that they could have even articulated a hand range for you. When you hit your hand the maniacs take care of getting all money in the pot you could wish for and then at the end give you the "Where did you come from look".

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    1. Thanks, AgSweep and thanks for commenting.

      It's true no one was paying attention to me at all, but that could also be a point in favor of Grump's position.

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  6. right, dont listen to grumps advice. remember he decided to move to NC to be with his girlfriend because he was embarrassed by how he was doing at poker

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    1. Yeah, it's embarrassing to be winning enough at poker to make a living at it.

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  7. Right, don't agree with Grump who is basically echoing the advice of people like David Sklansky who know nothing about winning poker strategy.

    I think what Grump is driving at is this: If you came to the poker table to maximize your winnings, then you're missing out by purposefully avoiding the action. If, on the other hand, you came to the poker table with the intent of minimizing your losses, then avoiding the "any two card" players by perma-folding until you get a premium hand is the optimal strategy.

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    1. Thanks, Jeff. Definitely Grump makes some good points, but like all poker decisions and strategies, IT DEPENDS.

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  8. Rob said he wasnt going to approve this comment until i verified it was me, i thought it was no big deal, reconsidered saying the comment and now i see hes posted it anyway. oh well.

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    1. No, Tony, the comment I asked you about was on the post "She's Got the Greatest Ass of All Time." I only questioned it because I sincerely thought it might be someone pretending to be you, not because it was in anyway offensive. So I posted the question, "was it really you?" as a comment on your blog, you neither approved the comment or answered if it was you or not. So I didn't post it. I figured if you wanted it published, you'd eventually ask about it.

      As for the comment above about Grump, I again thought it might be someone impersonating you, but I figured I'd let it go because I was pretty sure that Grump wouldn't be offended by it and you could always ask me to delete it if it wasn't you.

      But now with your comment here, I'm assuming you're admitting that both were indeed your comments, so I went ahead and posted the comment I was originally questioning this morning.

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  9. At the risk of sounding arrogant, this is not really a point subject to debate. It's kind of like evolution--it's true even if you don't happen to believe in it. It is not a matter of taste or opinion. It is just a fact that at a table with many players who are playing any two cards, you will, on average, make more money by loosening your starting hand requirements than by tightening them up.

    Let's consider a specific category of example. Let's assume that your table is full of people who will willingly put their entire stacks in with top pair/any kicker, and they play any starting hand with an ace in it. You, conversely, don't play any ace with a kicker worse than a jack.

    Naturally, when you and another player are in a hand and there is an ace on the flop, you will win much more often than you will lose, because you will have the better kicker much more often than he does. (Obviously, sometimes the opponent will make two pair or a weird straight or flush. But so will you, and those things should be about equal over time.)

    Now you can choose to make an adjustment because of the looseness of the table. Do you go tighter or looser? Suppose you go tighter, and don't play any ace except A-K. Clearly you will win the confrontations even more often now, because you will always have the better kicker (sometimes chopping when the opponent also has A-K). But you will get into those situations (i.e., where both you and an opponent flop top pair) much less often, because you now play only 1/3 as many A-x hands as you did before. You make less money overall, because losing 2/3 of the opportunities to stack opponents is a much bigger loss than the gain from never being outkicked.

    Now consider what happens if, instead, you expand your starting hand allowance down to, say, A-9, while your opponents continue to play all the way down to A-2. You will be outkicked more often now than with your baseline strategy, because your opponent can have, e.g., A-K against not just your A-Q and A-J, but also your A-10 and A-9. However, you also increase by 67% the number of times you will get into top pair vs. top pair confrontations.

    We can even get semi-quantitative about this. In your baseline strategy, about 1/4 of the time you will both be playing a K, Q, or J kicker. Those instances will be a wash in the long run, so let's ignore them. About 3/4 of the time your opponent is playing a 2-10 kicker, and you win. (I'm basically ignoring the situations where you chop because you have the same kicker. There will also be hands where neither kicker plays because they're below the cards on the board. But never mind that. As I said, this is just semi-quantitative for illustrative purposes, not rigorous.) So if effective stacks are, say, $100, you average a profit of about $75 every time one of these confrontations occurs.

    Now you tighten up to just A-K. Now you win 100% of the confrontations, but they occur only 1/3 as often. Suppose you were getting three such confrontations an hour before (the actual number doesn't matter), for a profit rate from this type of hand of $225/hour. Now the profit on each confrontation is $100, but you're having just one of them per hour. Your profit drops from $150/hour to $100/hour.

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  10. (continued)


    Alternatively, you could loosen up. If you take your starting standards down to A-9, you now get five such hands per hour rather than three. About 5 out of 12 times you and your opponent will both be playing kickers in the 9-K range, and those will be a wash in the long run. About 7/12 times, you will have the best kicker and win. So your profit over 12 hands is $700, or an average of $700/12 = $58 per hand. This is obviously less than the per-hand profit from your baseline strategy. But you're getting five of them per hour instead of three, so your profit rises to 5 x $58 = $290/hour, a good deal better than $225/hour at baseline strategy.

    Here's the Reader's Digest version: You want to expand your starting hand range enough that your profits go up by winning more pots, but not so much that your average starting hand range is the same as theirs. As long as you're reasonably judicious about it, the increased frequency of wins will more than compensate for the smaller profit per hand. Against a bunch of people who are playing any two cards, you can expand your range quite a bit and still on average have the strongest starting hand, which translates into the highest probability of winning the pot, assuming that you don't play worse than they do post-flop.

    Again I stress that this is not the kind of question on which reasonable people can have opposite but equally valid opinions, like whether strawberries are better than raspberries. The math (the real math, not just the back-of-the-envelope version I'm doing here) clearly favors widening your starting hand range. It does necessarily bring higher variance, but if the question is just long-term average profits, there's no serious question about the direction of the correct adjustment. Unlike most poker questions, here there is a factually, objectively right answer: Loosening up is more profitable, tightening up is less profitable. Those who disagree are simply wrong.

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    1. Awesome analysis, Grump, thanks.

      I repeat, I hope all of us poker playerr will continue to see such great analysis and commentary after leave Vegas for the confines of NC.

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  11. Oohh ... Grump posts a Rob-like comment to a Rob post!

    I pretty much agree with Grump. When I play with really loose people I loosen up or leave the table if it doesn't feel right. I don't loosen up so much that I am pissing away money on raises I don't/can't back up, however ...

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    1. Yeah, I was tempted to do my own "Grumps notes" version of his comment in response.

      But I didn't want to tease the poor guy like that because I know he is still smarting from having busted out early from his own "grumpament" last nite while both Prudence and I cashed.

      But no doubt more devastating to Grump was the stinging comment from Tony above.

      I'm sure he'll never be able to get those words out of his mind as he drives to NC.

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    2. Yes. Tony's surmise--for which he has not one iota of actual data--is emotionally crippling. If I were not already planning to move, I would have to do so now. Who could continue to show one's face in a city where one has been called out by the great TBC?

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    3. no offense, i just was bringing to peoples attention how grump has said in his own words that most of his income isnt from playing poker, but from his side consulting legal business. if his income was from poker, him and cardgrrl wouldnt chosen NC to live

      now me, no many how small my income is from poker, and im sure its even less than grumps, but not cause of my ability of course, but the size of my roll, but no matter how small, id never give it up to move.

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    4. You have cause and effect all turned around. I knew two years ago that I was going to be moving to live near my girlfriend (at the time I thought that was going to be Washington, DC, though the target city changed last year). That meant being able to live without depending on poker income. So I went to great lengths to take on consulting work that I can do from home, wherever I live. As the consulting work grew, my available time for poker became less, so of course I made less from poker. THAT WAS THE PLAN--to get to the point where I didn't need poker income to support myself.

      I am at a loss to explain how that story makes me (1) "embarrassed by how [I] was doing at poker" or (2) a less credible source of poker strategy advice.

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  12. At the risk of beating the proverbial dead horse, I thought of a way to do the math even more rigorously--and therefore, hopefully, more convincingly. I did a post on my blog about the results:

    http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2013/02/tighten-up-or-loosen-up-against-ultra.html

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    1. I love it when I say something so stupid you get to do your own post on your blog! When I have time I will more thoroughly read your own post and comment there, if necessary.

      Glad I inspired you!

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  13. We readers thank you for your sacrifice of having to stay and play poker just for the blog post. Thank you!

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    1. Thanks, LM. It's about time somebody thanked me for the sacrifices I make for my readers.

      Not only do I have to play poker for my readers, but it is sometimes necessary to study cleavage for an inordinate amount of time so I can report back to my readers.

      It is a huge sacrifice on my part, and it is nice to occasionally get appreciated for it.

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  14. Why would you have even thought about a table change here? This is the type of table you should always want to play it. I know I do. These are the types of tables where you'll make the most money. A dream table I would call it.

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    1. Thanks, Andy. Honestly, I never did really consider moving away from her, both for the blog and the poker, despite what I said above.

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  15. Thoroughly enjoyed reading this :) Come check out my blog too http://fastlanepoker.blogspot.ca/

    ReplyDelete