Love the game

Over the course of the 5 years I've been writing this blog, I moved from being an amateur or recreational player to being a professional.  Of the two terms, I prefer "recreational" to "amateur" because aside from the negative connotations associated with the word amateur ("that guy is an amateur" is more usually an insult than an observation or compliment), its origin as someone who "loves the game" suggests that a professional can't love the game (many do, including myself) or that someone who doesn't play to make money always does (I know several recreational players who appear to hate the game).

One of the side effects of this journey has been to make it harder for me to remember the perspective of the recreational player, what it was to be someone who played purely for enjoyment without regard to whether it made or lost me money. It's a good thing I ran well enough at the start to make money immediately, and got good enough at it quickly enough to continue doing so, because I genuinely believe if I wasn't and lost money from it, I'd go on playing it more than I should.

I recently wrote a blog describing my response to playing an event that attracted a field almost entirely composed of recreational players that gave my view (and that of many professional players) to certain characteristics of recreational players. Like adults writing about childhood, while not entirely an outsider's view since we were all children and recreational players at some point, it's certainly not an insider's view either as our recollections are filtered and dimmed by the years.

In response to this blog, one of my readers Barry Foley (a popular figure on the live poker scene) wrote the following piece to explain the attraction of poker to people who play it even if they don't expect to make money from it (in the short term at least). I'd like to thank Barry for the trouble of doing this and allowing me to include it here. So here's Barry's take:

Why does an ordinary office/shift worker love poker? As a 24/7 shift worker I often wondered why the game of poker was so hypnotising. Was it just a game of cards that people liked to play where destiny was up to cards or did you just get lucky?
Most of my work mates and friends thought the above until recently. I realised from my early days of playing chess (with my mum who happens to be a great poker player, Brenda Foley, well known in the local & national circles & brother) and from playing poker that the reality was quite different.
The cards had almost an insignificant value when the all other aspects came into play.
Each game of poker was similar to a game of chess. When you lost in a game of chess, all was good when you realised where you went wrong, giving you ammunition for getting better.
Analysing poker is different but requires a similar mental attitude.
As I said most of amateur beginners initially perceived cards as the way to go but if you lose a tourney, one who wanted to learn would ask themselves where did I go wrong.
Did I see my opponent's play?
Did I see my opponent's characteristics (loose/tight/passive/crazy & the combinations)?
Did he have tells?
Did I see his tells?
Did I see my own tells?
Did I give tells?
Did he or I have position?
What were the stacks?
What were the odds?
After analysing all, I realised that the cards dealt in poker are very insignificant in the big picture, and have little to do with real success.
More power to the game that it has honest good guys that do it for a who are willing to share all they know,. For me personally Dara, Andrew Dwyer, Anthony Rafferty, and Fergal Nealon are just a few that have been 100% forthcoming in any questions that I've asked regarding unique poker decisions. Thanks to help like this, I was even able to hold my own all day with Jude Ainsworth and Craig Burke at the last UKIPT, and was lucky to win a few chips by day end. Two gentlemen with whom I had a few beers after. Also a few mad arm wrestles (rematch with Ross Johnson coming soon, a good guy) as well but that's another story.
Realising the above I starting changing to absorb the above learnings. I can see why the game has become a world sensation, and a game for the people that really appreciate the game and work at it. This game is truly a game for self improvement at life as well as poker, if you look closely they are really intertwined.
So to answer the above question, why do us ordinary people play the game? We see the game as not just a game but as a different facet of life and to be honest an opportunity to grow.
OK so maybe most want to win the WSOP...but you have to learn and grow first.

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Blab and spam

Anyone who reads this blog will know I've been a little disillusioned lately with live poker. It's always been my view that if I'm not enjoying something any more I should stop doing it. Faced with these two options I would prefer to start enjoying it again rather than stop playing. With this in mind I decided to enter the IPO for the first time in 3 years as it has a reputation for being a fun tournament. Although I bricked across the board on the poker front, it's the most I've enjoyed a weekend of poker in a long time. I'd almost forgotten how much fun and how friendly most Irish recreational players are. I guess a combination of playing more abroad and the recession at home meaning players here playing less, but it was great to see so many old faces and new friendly ones. Professional poker is a pretty self absorbed pursuit at the best of times so it's always appreciated when people take the time to tell me they enjoy following my progress or reading the blog as so many did this weekend. Hats off to Stephen McLean and the rest of the crew involved.

On Sunday night, I attended the Irish Poker awards. I'd been nominated in 4 categories and took home two awards for Best Blog and Best (use of) Social Media. It's always nice to win something and since the awards were voted for by the public, I'd like to thank everyone who voted for me. A big well done to the winners in all the other categories, including my friends Jason Tompkins (Best Tourney player), Niall Smyth (Breakout Year), Phil Baker (Personality), JP McCann (TD) and Padraig Parkinson (Hall of Fame). Padraig's emotional acceptance speech was the highlight of the night, and in a world as self absorbed as poker where it's supposedly cool to pretend not to care what other people think about you, Padraig is an inspiration in his emotional honesty.

My wife came to collect me afterwards and as I got into the car she asked me what I'd won. When I told her "Best Blogger and Best Social Media User" she joked "So....blab and spam". While I know many would feel that an award for actually playing poker rather than writing or tweeting about it has more merit or is at least marginally less silly, I'm not one of them. I'd argue that an award proclaiming someone as "Best player" in a particular category is sillier if anything, since the real scoreboard in poker is money, and ergo whoever made the most money is the best. Or as I jokingly put it, the only awards that matter in poker are the Benjamins. However, awards for blog or personality or whatever clearly are not related to monetary success, and as such democracy is a much better way to hand out these accolades.

I started this blog five years ago purely as a sort of Dear Diary aimed at nobody other than myself. My idea was to have something to look back on after I was finished with poker. I didn't publicise the blog or even tell anyone I had one (how times have changed) but after a while I started to realise that other people were reading it. Mainly because people were coming up to me at tournaments and saying they enjoyed the blog. Knowing others read it changed the focus slightly, and for the most part I've tried to cut down on the whinges about bad beats and variance, and talk about stuff that at least has some chance of being interesting to other people. It's not easy to keep thinking of new stuff to say or at least new ways to say it over 300 blog entries and 5 years on, but as long as people keep reading it and pretending they enjoy it, I'll keep trying.

As I said in my brief acceptance speech, I think this award category was a strong one, as the other nominees are all top notch bloggers and collectively cover the spectrum of what a poker blog can be, from Padraig Parkinson's hilarious anecdotes and slices of life (Padraig told me he voted for my blog which is nice as I voted for his) through John O'Shea's candid rollercoaster account of the life of a professional degen to Nicky Power's local colour. When you add in David Lappin's excellent analytical blog which wasn't even nominated but many would argue deserves the award more than mine (David himself certainly does and has on many occasions to me), then I think we punch above our weight here. I know for a fact than even more people outside Ireland read this blog than people in Ireland and I suspect the same is true of the other blogs I mentioned.

The other award (Social Media) is something of an oddity and in many people's view is basically a reward for spamming :) I've attracted a lot of criticism down the years since I became the first Irish poker player to start tweeting extensively about poker and my use of Facebook solely for poker. At this stage I think everyone should have worked out my position on this and if they think it's over the top or overly one dimensional, there is the option to unfollow or unfriend me with no hard feelings. My primary use for the social media is to keep people who want to know informed of how things are going for me on the poker front, so if you don't want to hear about every 5k gtd final table I make online, then please do unfollow me as I'm not going to stop tweeting them to alert the handful of people who are interested and want to rail me.

In Vegas last year, I sat at a table where a bunch of online ballers were discussing appropriate use of Twitter and Facebook. The consensus among them was that Twitter was for chip counts and other minutia  and Facebook was for socialising with friends. I let the conversation play out before I chimed in with my 2 cents. I pointed out that my non-poker friends, most of whom were my age or older, did not spend hours every day online on Facebook, and regarded people who did and who regarded it as socialising as sad specimens. When they want to talk to me, they pick up a phone, or they call round my house, or arrange to meet me for dinner. They do not wish to be informed every time I place a sports bet or go to the gym, the cinema or the bathroom. As such, there is little real point in me using the social media other than the way I do (to talk poker). This is one of those situations where you have two different groups of people with diametrically opposed views, neither of which are universally right or wrong. It's up to everyone to decide if and how they want to use Twitter and/or Facebook. 95% of the people I know on Facebook are poker players so I feel it appropriate to mainly restrict my tweets and statuses to poker rather than a platform for my views on politics, religion or anything else.

So, now that you've rewarded me for blabbing and spamming, it shall continue. My next blog which I hope to post later this week will be a little unusual in that it won't be written by me but was written by one of my readers from the viewpoint of a recreational player. Over the course of this blog, I've moved from being a recreational player to a pro. As my view of poker has become a bit more calculating and perhaps cynical, it's harder for me to remember what it was like when I played the game purely for love of the game, so I'm very grateful to Barry Foley for going to the trouble of writing down his thoughts. It's his counterpoint response to this blog where I tried to explain the viewpoint of the professional player in terms recreational players might understand, and gave my observations on our perspective on recreational players. This was one of the most hotly discussed topics this weekend: it's clear that there is a growing cultural divide between a lot of recreational players and the self proclaimed "elite" players. My next blog (after the one written by Barry) will give my views on this culture clash and how I feel so called "elite" players should behave in relation to recreational or "fun" players.

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On the rail

The biggest indicator of the fact that I'm having the most lacklustre year of my 5 year career on the live poker front is the two highlights of my year have been railing my good friend Jason Tompkins, rather than sitting at the table. I already wrote my paean to Jason on the occasion of him final tabling a WSOP event a few months ago, so I'll try to keep the superlatives in check this time and just say that apart from being my friend Jason is the person I admire most in Irish poker. Not just for how well he plays and his achievements, but also the way he has gone about overcoming the obstacles life has thrown at him. His journey from the dole queues of Athy through ill health to where he is now, the brightest star of his generation in Irish poker, is truly inspirational.

On Wednesday night, we chatted on Skype for a few hours, as we often do (we're also business partners in a staking venture). This chat was slightly different though because the following day, Jason was going back to the final table of EPT San Remo. This was being streamed live with hole cards (on an hour delay) so Jason asked me to get up early (well, 1 o'clock is early in my world) to watch and pass on all vital information on non-showdown hands to him. No doubt mindful of the fact that I'm not exactly known for my short-windedness, he stressed "vital information only" a few times. It's risky enough dragging someone my age out of bed before he's had his 6 hours but then again it's not every day you get to see one of your friends play for a major title. Just once every three months if your friend happens to be Jason.

For the next 6 hours or so, I watched intently as the final table played out. Those railing on Irish Poker Boards where Jason is a popular figure commented on how slow it was. TV highlights programmes give the impression that final tables are all 3, 4 and 5 betting wars, all in confrontations and sensational coolers, but the reality is, as one poster noted, "poker is the second most boring spectator sport after cricket". Most hands consist of one guy raising, then everyone thinking about it, and folding, some more slowly than others (but none more slowly than the amateurish Mr. Raskin, who seemed determined to milk his moment in front of the cameras). Sometimes someone would call, so the dealer had to do a flop. Most of the time, the raiser bet the flop and the other guy folded. Sorry folks at home but that's just the way poker is in a slow structure. The challenge is to stay patient, focused and disciplined  when 99% of what you're doing is dull and routine (or "standard" in the language of poker).

Jason rose admirably to this challenge. David Lappin has given a good insight into the optimal strategy in these situations and I gather we'll hear more from Jason on his blog in due course but the bottom line is Jason ran ice cold when it mattered, was faced with a few tough marginal spots and got them all right.  In so doing, he gave himself a chance to catch the wave which unfortunately never came, and finished as high as anyone could have given the cards and situations. I think at least 90% of players would have been eliminated in 6th or 7th had they been sitting in Jason's seat. Do I believe in poker karma? Yes and no. In the short term I think we get what fortune decides to give us, but in the long term people do seem to get what they deserve in poker most of the time. It's certainly true that over the course of my relatively short poker career I've seen some shooting stars that seemed to be riding the variance wave luckbox a big score or two, convince themselves and maybe even others that they were better than they actually were, but ultimately end up giving it all back. So if poker karma does exist, I think maybe it's just the acceptable face of the schadenfreude family. (On a sidenote, I was in business for 20 years during all of the Celtic Tiger and whatever about poker karma, business karma certainly didn't seem to exist. As one business friend put it, "It's always the absolute worst assholes who get to drive off into the sunset in the red Ferrari with the money and the girl". That seemed to be true at the time, but most of those guys are now hiding from NAMA or even looking at jail time, so maybe Karma Freude gets everyone in the end).

Jason was ringing me at breaks. There's a terrific temptation that needs to be resisted in these situations: becoming a backseat driver. I'm more opinionated than most but in my opinion the last thing a player as talented as Jason needs is some guy thousands of miles away watching a live stream telling him what he thinks he should be doing. So I tried to keep myself to passing on the information Jason wanted, and acting as a listener and sounding board to his thoughts on how it was progressing.

I was also watching the reaction of people on IPB, Twitter and Facebook and chatting to a few people on Skype as it was all unfolding. Jason, ever the polite gentleman, rang me after his bustout to thank me for my efforts. I told him truthfully that I just wished my services had been required for longer.

Jason's more than twenty years younger than me, he's actually younger than my oldest son, but in a poker sense we're contemporaries. In fact he started before me, but we rose through the ranks contemporaneously. By my count, we've played together on five final tables (I may be forgetting one or two) in Ireland, including a CPT Grand final which he chopped (as an addendum to which Jason recently told me that his girlfriend Joy who is a delight took an instant dislike to me and told him to target me :)) and a JP Masters. I hung out a lot with him and Joy at my first EMOP in Gran Canaria, and we roomed together in Berlin last year and Vegas this summer. We hopscotched each other on the all time Ireland money list on the Hendon mob until he flew by me with his deep run in the WSOP in the summer. On Twitter during his EPT final table, I joked it would take a lot of min cashes in €100 side events for me to catch him now.

The advantage of being both a friend and rival to someone as good as Jason is he sets very high targets if you want to live in his company. He made some very kind comments on a recent blog he wrote about how my continuing success online had inspired him to start grinding again. The corollary of that is that I'm hoping that his amazing success this year in the big events (he's now cashed in three successive EPTs) will spur my efforts on the live front. Not many players worldwide can say they final tabled an EPT and a WSOP in the same year.

As I said at the start of this blog, I've struggled this year live. I've cashed in about the same number of events as I normally would and I've even managed to win one, but in a sense it's been the wrong events. I haven't done well in the bigger buyins and while I accept you can't pick and choose which events to run well in, it is frustrating. Frustrating enough that recently I've been considering my options live. I have considered them all, from total retirement (to allow me to concentrate on online and spend more time at home) through just playing the big events to continuing to do what I've always done (an impromptu mix and match of different events, tours and buyins). I may have reached a point in my poker life where there's really no point leaving the house to play smaller events any more. I don't enjoy them like I used to, and even when I cash I end up thinking I could have made the same or more clicking buttons in the comfort of my own home. So perhaps I need to learn from Jason who picks and chooses his events much more carefully and only comes out for the big ones. Whatever I eventually decide, it's safe to say that I'll be hoping to draw inspiration from Jason, who I believe is Ireland's finest live player, if and when I do go out to play live.

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Action junkie peacock

The last side event at EMOP Barcelona was a deepstack turbo. I like a good crapshoot and since you can't play online in Spain anyway, took my place at the start.

First shock was the chips. They looked like my cheapo home set, but with more colours. Closer examination revealed no less than 7 different denominations in play, from a 5k chip all the way down to, wait for it, a few 10 chips. Yes, 10. I've never seen that particular denomination before live and before I could ponder what we were going to need them for, I caught sight of the clock. First blind level: 10/20. Another first for me live: I've only ever seen that level online before.

The blind levels got madder and madder (70/140, seriously) and because they'd only given us all a couple of 10's and 20's, the dealer spent ages every hand making change. Not good in a turbo crapshoot with 15 minute blinds! Matters were made worse when the table hyperlag kept winning all the small pots and as a result started to monopolise all the small chips. Clearly feeling that the mountain of chips in front of him demonstrated his manhood for all the world to see, he refused all requests for change at point blank, and the tournament director (or at least someone in a suit: this tournament was such a shambles it's difficult to believe there even was a TD) had to be summoned to get him to do so. So we all breathed a sigh of relief when this action junkie peacock lost a massive confrontation with another big stack and had all but a few of his chips taken from him. The table felt confident our new chip overlord would be more benevolent in the change department.

Unfortunately, we never got the chance to test that theory as almost immediately the guy in the suit popped up and escorted him and his chips to a new table. Just as the blinds were going to 70/140. Oh what fun that level was on a table with few small chips.

At the break, another Irish player told me he was trying to work out if he could size a bet so that because of the amount, nobody on the table would be able to call it (as the requisite change could not be made). After the break, things went from bad to worse in the change department with the introduction of a 30 ante, making it necessary in theory for everyone to put in a 20 and a 10, or three 10's, whereas in practise 8 of us would put in a 50 chip and the dealer would spend an eternity trying to solve the "How to make change" puzzle. The one hand we managed to play at that level descended into total farce when two guys exuberantly pushed all their chips into the middle with the (shared) nuts, meaning the dealer now had to work out what the smaller stack was, and how to split the pot.

I eventually managed to bust this farce of a tournament and to be honest I was never as happy to bust a tournament. Back in the hotel, I heard that Daragh Davey was deep in the 888 Major. Turns out that in Spain not only can you not play on non-Spanish sites, you can't even rail (at least the Americans let you watch) so I had to rely on Skype for a direct link to Daragh. He gave me the blow by blow as he took it down. It's been a pleasure to watch Daragh turn from a predominantly live cash grinder this year into a proper online beast. On that note, a big well done to Jaymo, another member of the firm (stable is such an ugly word so I try to stick to firm) who came close to claiming a major with a second on Ipoker.

Since returning from Spain, apart from one very unenjoyable day playing French people in the Winamax European Shorthanded championships in the Regency, I've been sticking to the online. I'm not enjoying live poker much at all these days. It probably doesn't help that I'm on the worst run of my career live since Vegas but for whatever reason, trivial stuff like rude opponents and incompetent staff that I normally take in my stride seems to annoy me more than it should these days. So a bit of a break is no harm at all (I skipped recent live events in Cork, Carlow and Dundalk that I normally would go to).

Finally, this blog is up for an Irish Poker award so if you're a fan of the blog, please feel free to vote for it. Or if you're a bigger fan of one of the others, vote for that instead.

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Making the right move at the wrong time

The recent decision of the Spanish government to take their entire poker playing population into a kind of protective custody by ring fencing them so they can't play on foreign sites and foreigners can't play on theirs means that poker trips to Spain for online poker aficionados are like pilgrimages to Mecca for porn addicted alcoholics. After a day of moping around feeling sorry for myself and my Spanish flu I arose from my sick bed to go play the 300 side event at EMOP Barcelona.

Despite continuing to feel rather poorly I was raring to play a bit of poker after 48 poker free hours. As someone who plays a lot more live than most online pros I sometimes get asked about the adjustment needed from online to live. Alongside the fact that live player ranges tend to be a lot different and you have to keep track of the betting pattern stuff yourselves with no live HUD the most important adjustment in my view is to be able to gather and assess the wealth of additional information available to you when you can actually look at your opponent. By observing how a player looks and acts physically when he's bluffing, when he has it and when he's not sure if his hand is good, you have additional information to consider when you're in a hand against him.

I think one problem online players have is a kind of sensory overload live, as they are overwhelmed by the wealth of additional information and either end up ignoring it all, or focusing on the wrong stuff. I personally believe that even live, betting patterns are more important than supposed "live tells". For one thing, live players tend to have more bet sizing tells than onliners.

So what do you do if you find yourself unable to keep track of everyone's betting tendencies, body language, physical tells and all the rest of it? Some suggest that you should concentrate mainly on the player to your immediate right and the one to your immediate left, presumably on the basis that you'll usually end up playing more pots against them. My advice, if you think you can only get a proper read on two players at the table at a time, is to forget about your neighbours and focus on the two loosest players on the table. These guys will play the most pots and therefore give away the most information about how they play. And because they're playing so many hands, chances are you'll play more pots against them. It's also true, in my experience, at least early in tournaments that the loosest player at the table is often also the worst. Bad and loose is a great combination when you're looking to target someone to build a stack, so once you find one of these, you want to play as many pots as you can against them while it's deep (and therefore not a major mistake to play dubious hands against them) and they still have chips.

In this particular side event, I quickly identified my neighbour two to my right as the weakest link. When he sat down first, I thought he might play tight as he was a grizzled veteran, but this particular stereotype doesn't seem to apply in countries with a Mediterranean coast. If anything, the OAPs seem to be the most maniacal. He was playing most hands, and he had some very identifiable bet sizing tells. Most of his strong hands he was opening for 3x. That went down to 2x for weak hands (unsuited ace rags, dubious one picture card holdings and gapped connectors), and went up to 4x or higher for hands that he clearly felt were very good hands, but tricky to play (nines through jacks, aq). The only one I couldn't quite work out what it meant was the limp reraise. A number of times he limped in early position, then reraised massive when someone raised. I thought this might be monsters until he did it a number of times, at which point I moved over to the view it was more likely AK.

Being able to put an opponent on a fairly tight range based on his open is a major plus. Additionally, I identified a number of post flop tendencies: he tended to call and hope to hit with his draws rather than play them aggressively, and he totally overplayed top pair and overpair hands (he lost one massive pot where he check raised all three streets with top pair). He liked to go for the check raise with hands he thought were strong (top pair or better) and bet with absolute spanners or underpairs.

So when my friend opened 3x in mid position, I elected to call on the button with 76s. Against some opponents I'd either threebet (for deception) or fold this hand early on, but against him I certainly didn't want to get fourbet massive, nor did I want to fold. The two blinds called, and the flop came J76 with two diamonds. Checked to me, I bet, and after the two blinds folded my friend check raised huge. Based on what I knew of how he played, I
(a) ruled out a set of jacks which he'd have 4xed pre and either check called or check raised smaller on the flop. The other sets were possible but unlikely given my blockers
(b) ruled out all two pair hands all of which he'd have 2xed pre
(c) ruled out draws. All the straight draws he would have opened for 2x, and the flush draws he'd have check called on the flop

That pretty much only leaves one pair hands like AJ or overpairs, or total air (he did seem capable of playing something like KQ like this), so after running through all the relevant betting pattern information and looking at him (he looked very confident that he had the best hand: he had a pretty outrageous physical tell when bluffing, namely he stared directly at the person he was trying to bluff) I decided he either had AJ/KJ or an overpair and shoved.

He called immediately, flipped over KK and looked astonished to find he was behind. Only temporarily though, as a jack on the turn made him the better hand, and as he scooped in the pot as I walked away from the table, I reflected how poker is probably the one game where you can read a situation perfectly, do everything right, and still lose. That's poker baby, and that's what makes it profitable in the long term, so there's no point feeling sorry for yourself or complaining when you get sucked out on. The possibility to suck out is what keeps the bad players playing the good ones for sums of money that, say, bad chess players would never play grandmasters.

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