Friday, August 25: Our New Ambassador

For some reason, blogger was unavailable from my Australian ISP for the last week so I had trouble posting...hopefully this is solved now.

First of all, if you haven't yet listened to (or heard about) the following, if you've got a moment I suggest you listen to the interview with WSOP main even winner Jamie Gold at bigpoker.ca (with which I have no affiliation) -- I was left utterly speechless. Even speaking as a guy who has admittedly never been accused of being too modest, I was practically slack-jawed listening to that interview. This could either be very good for poker in the upcoming year, or very, very bad. We've been blessed with 3 outstanding ambassadors for the game in recent years in the form of Raymer, Moneymaker, and Hachem (in that order, in my own opinion), but this Gold character is a truly horse of a different color. We'll see what comes of this after the ESPN broadcasts...

One of my favorite guilty pleasures on 2+2 is the "Brags, Bad Beats, and Variance" forums. Funny, if you had asked me about how worthwhile such a forum would have been before they created it last year, I would have told you that it was a pretty dumb idea, and would likely be populated by nothing but "online poker is rigged!!" and "check out how bad this beat was" posts. And it IS a dumb idea...but also pretty entertaining to read at times, discussing people's upswings and downswings, and it's somewhat therapeutic when you can read about just how savagely Father Variance can attack even the best players. Whereas most of the other forums retain at least SOME air of decorum and posting etiquette (yes, just a little), the BBV forum is a completely unvarnished smorgasborg of bravado, insult-humor, and pissing contests; a pseudo-Freudian and unapologetic window into posters' poker "ids", and it's occasionally a fun read. One point the forum has really driven home is that the 300-big-bet rule of thumb is very much antiquated. It might be a function of the games getting slightly more difficult, or more aggressive, but I subscribe largely to the belief that it was never really true to begin with, and those suffering downswings greater than the 300BB axiom simply weren't in any rush to divulge it publicly, lest they be labeled big fish. But the BBV forum is now rife with examples that even very good players can and do suffer through 500 to even 1,000 (!) big-bet swoons. Makes me feel a tad better about my recent high-stakes frustrations...I never really calculated just how many BBs it was (my jumps between LHE and NL made that a little complicated), but it was well in excess of the 300BB marker.

I still read the strategy forums every once in a while, but can never seem to muster up the energy to post there...there's just such a thick veil of complete bullshit that permeates nearly every thread. An overwhelming majority of posters simply have no idea what they're talking about, and -- as I've written several times before -- the day my poker education took a huge step forward was the day I stopped treating clueless strategy advice posted by 18-year old Clearasil babies on 2p2 as poker gospel, and realized that I was already playing better than nearly all of them. If you're winning even just 1BB/100, be confident enough in your abilities to realize that you're more skilled than 90% of 2p2'ers, and filter everything you read through your own internal bullshit-meter. One of the biggest problems in strategy threads I believe is the philosophy that there is one, single, correct (or at least most correct) action for every decision point in every hand. That simply isn't true; in fact, an outstanding suggestion that was unfortunately never really adopted on a wide enough scale was the proposal that strategy advice should never be doled out in the form of "this is a clear raise, call, fold", but rather should be given in the form of a ratio like x:y:z corresponding to the percentage of times -- in situations like that -- that one should call:raise:fold. For examnple, imagine a situation where it's folded around to the blinds, the SB completes, the BB raises with AK and the SB calls. Now the flop comes K,7,2 rainbow and the SB leads out with a bet. The BB, sitting there with a very strong holding might make a post on 2+2 wondering how to extract the most from the SB who is unwittingly betting into a very strong hand. The forums are full of knuckle-draggers arguing about the virtues of raising vs. just calling in order to raise on later streets, as though one were correct, and the other were patently retarded. I think a far more illuminating way of approaching the question is an "action ratio" presented in the form of something like 75:25:0, indicating that in situations like this the BB should raise 75% of the time, just call 25%, and never fold. Other, more complex scenarios might produce action rations that look something like 60:30:10.? I think this more appropriately reflects the metagame features of a game of incomplete information; there are substantial advantages to changing up one's style of play, and the stark reality of the situation is that without knowing your opponent's hole cards, there is hardly EVER one clearly-correct course of action in a hand (unless, for example, you hold the nuts and have your opponent betting into you on the river.) Will that "action ratio" proposal ever gain any momentum?? I doubt it; first of all, it relies on the premise that a certain specific scenario could be played out an infinite number of times (or at least with sufficient frequency to be able to employ the ratio with any measure of fidelity). This isn't a Turbo Texas Hold'em environment where one situation can be replayed over-and-over. It's also admittedly difficult to recognize when one decision is 'identical' to a previous one. But most of all, I doubt most 2p2'ers will be ever have the humility to even contemplate that there is nearly always more than one 'correct' course of action -- it's apparently way more fun to respond with "If you think this is a clear raise, you need your head examined, you herpes-ridden douchenozzle."