Killing Phils

I wish I had a bunch of something good to write about my WSOP this year, but I don’t. So I’ll blog about nothing. Worked for Seinfeld, why not me?

This was supposed to be the summer of Blair. At least from my viewpoint. I envisioned a couple bracelets, at minimum, and a very deep run at the Main Event. Actually I envisioned even more, but I don’t want to really embarrass myself. Tournament poker is a very high-variance endeavor. If you’re an amateur who plays occasionally, you’ll either get deep or lose, but won’t think much about it. If you’re a pro who plays both live and the occasional tournament, as I used to do, you won’t get the full effect. But if you’re a full-time tournament player whose financial well-being depends on success, sooner or later you’re going to experience an extended bad run that will boggle your mind and test you to the limit.

Most tournaments pay around the top 10% of the field. So you’re about a 9-1 underdog to cash in any particular event. If you’re a very good player, your skill level may bring it down to 6 or 7-1. And that’s just to min-cash. To actually win a tournament, even for the best players, is a very long shot. Phil Hellmuth has famously said that if it weren’t for luck he’d win every tournament. In truth, if not for luck, he might not have won any. No knock against Phil, but for any player to win a particular tournament he had been very lucky for that period of time. For some players that time never comes. It possible for a very good player to go his whole career without winning a bracelet or major title.

At the WSOP I’ve averaged four cashes and one final table in the post-Moneymaker era starting in 2004, including a bracelet in 2007. This year I’m 0-for-28. If I was sitting here feeling that I’ve been out-gunned, or that the game has passed me by, I’d have to think about my poker future. But that’s not the case. My last event before the ME, the 1500 NL, is a microcosm of my entire WSOP. I started out fast, picking up some pots, including one with KK, my only pair bigger than 9’s in the entire event. I had worked it up to about 9k (from a starting stack of 4500) at the 3^rd level when a player determined that he wanted to overbet all-in with AQ. I made a solid call with 99, but lost the race in a 9k pot. I was back to 5k and got it back to about 6k when I made another good call and looked at A7 vs my 77. Lost that one to a runner-runner flush. I won a short stack all-in with AJ vs A2 to hang in there, and another late one when I was very short with QJ vs 45. I played my heart out to hang in and finish the day 460^th out of 465 with 5100. But, I was feeling good about my play and confident coming back the next day. I picked up the blinds three times early and had it up to 7500. Then I got all-in with AT vs A4, in a pot that would have gotten me to 17k and a real shot at making the money and beyond. Except that I lost as a solid favorite once again. Five confrontations with the cards turned up with more to come, I was a favorite in all of them, and I lost the three big ones. I can’t remember any big-bet event where I went out as an underdog, and in most of them I was a solid to big favorite.

Ok, enough of that. My purpose here isn’t to bemoan my bad beats. (Well, maybe a little bit.) The point is that these mind-boggling streaks can happen at any time. I’ve played as a pro for thirty years, and have experienced many ups and downs. Two of my downswings were what I can the deep, dark ones. While losing always sucks, the deep, dark ones leave a mark on your psyche, like a painful childhood memory. To me, losing streaks are like an earthquake; you’re never sure if it’s about over or just beginning.

Poker’s easy when everything’s going well. If everything worked out the way we drew it up there would be millions of pros making a living from the game. But it doesn’t. Randomness always makes itself a major factor. The lucky players spend the majority of their time on the right side of the bell curve, at least for a while. If it happens at the beginning of their career, they may actually turn out to be the unlucky ones, because they might not be able to handle it when it turns, and could spend the rest of their life chasing it. If you want to see some examples of this, just look at the railbirds trying to drum up a stake. For others the opposite is true; their deep, dark streaks come early, and they’re soon out of the game as pros and on to other and hopefully better things. The number one factor in making a true professional poker player isn’t knowing the math, or psychology, or any of the other things taught in books. The one indispensible trait is the ability to handle adversity. For any gambler, the percentage of the time that he’s at the peak of his lifetime earnings is very, very  small. That means for most of a gamblers life he’s stuck, at least from the viewpoint of his all-time high point. It’s tough to reconcile, and if you look around a poker room, virtually every player is on some level of tilt.

People wonder why players in the biggest games, (who, other than the occasional live one, are all experienced and talented), sit there and play with each other. Chip Reese explained it very well in an article I read a while back. He called it “the law of least tilt”. (The term might have been coined by Mike Caro). When everyone is nearly equal in skill level, the players with the least tilt factor will have the edge. Chip always prided himself on being able to play exactly the same regardless of his personal circumstances. I’m skeptical as to whether this was 100% true, but his ability to control his emotions better than everyone else was a big reason he was one of the greatest ever. For other players, circumstances on and off the table affect their performance to varying degrees. And it’s a constantly changing factor. A great player constantly monitors opponents tilt factor and adjusts accordingly.

A lot of the kids who have taken the plunge into full-time poker have no idea how bad things can really get. Many of the ones who have hit the deep, dark streaks have determined it’s not worth the mental, physical and financial stress and have gone back to their pre-poker lives. And everything that happens on the internet is in hyper speed compared to live play. For American players, those one month bad runs online will stretch into six months or more in live poker, something much more difficult to handle mentally and emotionally.

As I pointed out above, variance in tournament play is a bigger factor than in side games, and the mental stresses are greater. For one thing, since tournaments are finite and blinds and antes must constantly escalate, there’s a small number of key hands in any event that will determine any particular player’s fate. As a player you must maintain a positive mental attitude in order to play your best. Expecting to lose certainly can’t be beneficial, and very few people are automatons with no emotions. Going into a tournament, or a long series of events like the WSOP, a player must envision success and exude confidence to play his best. That makes the letdown that occurs the majority of the time even harder to handle. And you must find a way to come back the next day with the same positive outlook, or you shouldn’t play.

The past five weeks for me have been an emotional roller coaster and stressful in a lot of ways. I don’t know if I want to play a full schedule at the WSOP next year. The sponsorship opportunities aren’t there like they were a few years back, and the value of a bracelet, while still the biggest prize in poker, has been diminished and that trend will likely continue (a subject for another blog). I’ll probably go back to the way I used to do it and play some side games, selected events, and get in some golf and other kinds of things that are fun!

The summer of Blair’s not over yet, however. I still have one big bullet left to fire in the Main Event, which starts for me on Saturday. I’m going to be in a positive frame of mind, and keep visualizing success until they put the final stake in my heart. I have a whole lot of running good due me, and this would be a great time for things to level out.

On another note, I watched the final table of the $50k Players Championship the other night on ESPN3. It was a compelling show, with quality announcers and high drama, as Phil Hellmuth continued his quest for his 12^th bracelet. I don’t think there could have been a better example of the demarcation between old school and new school no-limit hold’em than the contrast in style between Brian Rast and Phil. It’s unfortunate for Phil, as well as 3^rd place finisher Mihn Ly, that TV dictates that the FT of an 8-game event be all no-limit hold’em, which I’m pretty sure is Brian’s best game. I doubt Phil would ever consent to play Brian in a heads-up no-limit cash game, but this was a tournament and Phil is obviously very experienced in tournament play. Phil hit a rush of cards when they got heads-up and had Brian on the ropes, but that old devil variance made an appearance and Brian won three straight all-ins to finish Phil off. If the stream is still available, I highly recommend watching it. Even without hole cards being shown it was great. Maybe even more so, because you had to speculate on the hands along with the players.

While there was lots of great play and drama, my favorite part of the show had nothing to do with it. I’ve played with Mihn for many years. He truly is a poker enigma, playing 10-20 limit or a $100 tournament one day, and $2000-4000 or a $50k event the next. Mihn is a very nice and friendly guy and I have had many short conversations with him over the years. And I’ve never understood one word he’s said! Kara Scott was doing the interviews and I couldn’t wait for Mihn’s exit interview. And he didn’t disappoint! Kara asked him a question and he replied in Mihn-speak. She had no idea what he said or what to do next, so just kind of said thank you and walked away. Priceless!

Good luck to everybody playing the Main Event. May it be your summer if it can’t be mine.

Let me say it louder; LOSING SUCKS!! For years I’ve been writing tournament reports about events where I’ve gotten deep. There were always exciting, key moments and hands late in events  that were interesting and instructive. This year my key moments are happening in the first few levels, where I’ve consistently gotten my chips in good, and then have taken the walk of shame.

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The WSOP is one of the highlights of my year. So is U.S. Open golf week. I always schedule a break from playing poker to enjoy the Open, before I come back for the closing push at the Rio. This year I’m off to an 0-fer-16 start at the WSOP, the worst I can ever remember. And the Open sucks!

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Haven’t blogged in a while, but I haven’t had anything really blog-worthy. Two weeks in already, and nothing to show for my efforts.  I feel like I’m playing well, but I’m running about as bad as possible. I don’t want to bore you with bad-beat stories, and I don’t really want to relive them, so I’ll move on to other things.

There was a lot of speculation and apprehension as to the effects on the WSOP of the Black Friday indictments, perfectly timed by the DOJ to cast a shadow on the tournament that took poker out of the back rooms and put it in the public spotlight four decades ago. Poker players are aghast at the governmental bullying and the duplicitous way they have attacked an American pastime that has been enjoyed by presidents and politicians since the dawn of our country. And the players have spoken. There have been record setting fields in many events, the cash games are packed, and the whole town is in a poker frenzy.

Prohibition has never worked in curtailing activities in which people want to partake. The most obvious example was of course America’s experiment with outlawing alcohol. All that did was turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into lawbreakers, and give rise to a criminal sub-culture that exists to this day. The drug war has been an even  bigger disaster.

Our enemy, as a supposed free people, is those who use their positions of power to attempt to control the way we live our lives. This is the opposite of the reason this country went through so many hardships to become a free nation. And our enemy not only holds all the cards in terms of legislative, judicial and police power, but they are ingenious in the way they can use underhanded methods to subvert the collective will of the people they’re supposed to represent. The way Bill Frist and his band  set up the poker sites, by avoiding a discussion of the legalities of the game, which they were afraid they would lose, and instead using a back door to derail the poker sites by forcing them to circumvent banking laws in order to survive, is a lesson in lengths self-serving politicians(redundancy alert!) are willing go to in order to push personal agendas.

What are those personal agendas? Certainly not to protect the country from the evils of poker.  Every politician has one major objective when he gets in office—to get re-elected. Period! So it’s really not Frists, or any other politico’s, desire to tell other how to live their lives (unless, of course, failure to do so somehow threatens their political tenure). Their desire is to keep up a finger to the wind emanating from the people who can keep them in their cushy position of power. Apparently Frist felt that enough of his constituents were the type who want to tell others how to live their lives that it would be politically advantageous to attack those who enjoy gambling. He must have stuck his dirty little fingers in the wrong place, however,  because he went from being a aspiring presidential candidate to retiring from politics in disgrace. His legacy lives on, however, embodied in the Black Friday indictments, and is felt by every poker player today.

Despite recent events, Las Vegas is packed with poker players, at many venues.  Every poker player worth his salt makes his way to the WSOP at some point. Despite the stance of some in power, we as a people have asserted our opinion that poker is an acceptable pastime, and we don’t care what they think. I think it’s possible, and I truly hope, that the online poker prohibition will turn out to be a watershed moment in our battle to stem the tide that is relentlessly eroding our rights as free Americans. So, as long as we’re all here, let’s raise our collective finger, so Bill Frist, wherever he’s hiding, and those of his ilk can clearly see which way this wind is blowing.

Other than the poker, it’s boring at the Rio. The halls are pretty dead; there’s no bar, no player’s lounges, nobody hanging out and whooping it up. The WSOP, especially in the old days, was fun! Few players (other than Mr. 11, almost Mr. 12 last week) cared about bracelets. It was about golf, cash games, and hanging out and partying. The modern-era emphasis on WSOP success, winning bracelets and self-promotion and marketing has put a damper on the fun factor. But, the presence of the online sites, especially pre-UIGEA, added an element of festiveness to the occasion. Black Friday has put a final nail in that coffin. One of many groups of people put of work by the government is models, who use to roam the halls in hordes. Now we have thousands of predominantly male poker hanging around with nothing to look at but each other. Where are the Milwaukee’s Best girls? Or the Sapphire’s dancers? Or some hot chicks in dearfoams eating Jack’s Beef Jerky? Go Daddy girls? You’re known for them—send a few down. Damn, it’s like playing at the Elks Club.

I’m taking my annual US Open golf break, deserved or not, except possibly for the 3k PLO Friday night. I hate it when they schedule events I like on US Open weekend. And the Seniors! Don’t they know old guys love to sit around and watch great golf? I love that event but I always end up passing it. I’ll be back Monday for the 5k six-handed PLO, ready to make my closing rush.

The theme this year, as it’s been for the past few, is kids. They’re here in droves and are a dominant force.  In the early days of the WSOP, old-timers dominated and it was big news when a youngster made a splash, i.e. Bobby Baldwin in 1978. Today the reverse is true. I don’t know what the odds are of a player over fifty winning the ME, but I’m sure they’re pretty long.

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T-minus 18 hours until my first event and counting! Quite amazing to me that the WSOP is here already. After the November Nine ends, the WSOP seems so far away, but it sneaks up on you so fast! The kids can’t appreciate what I’m talking about. For them it’s like Christmas—it seems like it will never arrive. But, as you get older, the merry-go-round spins faster and faster, and there’s no slowing it down. As kickoff nears, the anticipation builds, to where I just want to get on with it. The waiting is driving me crazy.

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Pretty obvious that Black Friday has rocked the poker world. Every poker player is affected in some manner. I have little empathy for the site owners or the processors. They knew the risks and thought the rewards justified them. Wonder how they feel now?  

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The 2011, post-Black Friday WSOP approaches with lots of unknowns, thanks to the actions of the U.S. government. I don’t want to get too in-depth in this blog with the fact that Internet poker has become a political football, and that decisions involving its legalization have more to do with political expediency and money than common sense and fair play, except to say this: I read an article a few years back where the author was contemplating what to call a collection of politicians, i.e. a herd of cows, gaggle of geese, etc. What he proposed was “a scum of politicians”. Perfect!

The neutering of the major sites in the U.S. poses lots of questions for this year’s WSOP, and for the future of poker in general:

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You know, one of those who you once knew well, hadn’t stayed in touch with or seen in a while, but always remained part of the fabric of your life.

In 1976 I was fresh out of college, with no real map for my future other than getting out of the frozen Northeast.  At the end of summer I put what I could fit in my old Mercury and set off for the West with a pocket full of dreams and $400. I had always been a gambler and, while I didn’t admit it to my gambling-averse parents, Vegas was dead in my sights. My brother rode out with me and we hit Vegas on a sweltering September day. Knowing nothing of how to approach the town, (there was no Las Vegas Advisor then) we found a cheap room at a now-defunct dive motel called the Domino, down on Main St. near the site of the future Stratosphere.

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