August 2006 Archives

Last week PokerStars added HORSE to its repertoire of games. HORSE is an acronym for Hold 'Em, Omaha 8, Razz, Stud, and Stud 8 ("Eight or better" hi-low stud). The game types switches after each round, where a round lasts for as many hands as there are seats at the table. Or something like that. Anyway, HORSE is reputed to be a better test of general poker skills because it requires mastery, or at least competence, in many of the major forms of poker.

On day one PokerStars had only $1/$2 limit cash games. These are bigger stakes than I've ever played, but I wanted to give it a try. In each of my first two sessions I turned $10 into $80. Brimming with confidence, I then went on a bender in my third session and turned $80 into $0.

On day three PokerStars introduced HORSE tournaments. After reading up a bit on Razz strategy (where I noticed I was losing the most money among the five different game types), I entered two $3.40 tourneys and won both of them.

So the jury's still out whether I have any HORSE skills. But here are my observations:

• Limit is quite a different game from no-limit. I haven't put my finger on exactly how it's different, but there is quite a bit more subtlety to betting than with no-limit. Suppose you have a monster hand against what you believe to be your opponent's playable hand. Thus, your goal is to maximize the amount of money in the pot, as well as to keep the hand going as long as possible. In no-limit, you have four options: make a big bet and hope he comes along for the ride; make a value bet and hope he doesn't smell a trap; check-call and represent a draw; or check-raise and hope he calls. (Obviously, there's also bet-reraise but that's a rare dream scenario.) In any of these cases the visible action is different, so in some ways it's clear to an attentive observer what's going on. But with limit, there isn't any quantitative difference between a big bet and a value bet, which makes it harder to discern the meaning of an opening bet. Moreover, if your goal is to get as much money in the pot as possible, then other factors become relevant, such as who begins the action and how many players are at the table. It's possible that limit is actually a simpler game than no-limit and that I'm confusing lack of familiarity with complexity, but at the moment I find I'm spending more cognitive cycles trying to figure out what the heck my opponent is thinking, whereas in no-limit I find I can usually narrow it down to three choices (strong representing weak, weak representing strong, or on a draw).
• Razz seems to be a game of bluffing. That's the only way I can think of that makes it interesting; otherwise, it's just several people calling bets and hoping the next card doesn't make a pair. Unfortunately, at the lower levels, I don't see people paying a great deal of attention to other players' hands. How else can you explain why someone keeps calling with 89K when I'm showing 762?
• In hi-low stud, forget it: you're not going to be able to make a low hand. I don't care if your starting hand is A23. Just fold.
• Tournaments seem like they will last forever until you get to the non-stud-based games (Hold 'Em and Omaha). Suddenly, instead of tiny antes and small bring-ins, you are hit with blinds -- which have gone way up since the last Hold 'Em round. One round of $100/$200 Hold 'Em quickly knocks out the small stacks.
• Stud is a hard game because it requires card memory. In Hold 'Em, the only thing you have to remember is the previous betting action. Since bets are closely related to threats, your primal fear center naturally remembers things like check-raises or suspicious cold calls. But in Stud, you have to quickly memorize the ranks and suits of all visible cards, including those that get immediately folded after the deal. You never know when your hand will develop into a two-outer situation that's actually a zero-outer if you'd noticed that both black tens were folded on third street.

A couple months ago I bought a Buffalo Terastation. It's a bit on the expensive side for 750GB of storage (1TB in RAID-5 configuration), but it mostly satisfied my desire for a hassle-free, turnkey storage appliance.

Mostly. Two weeks ago it started accessing the hard drives constantly, and loudly. I unplugged the network cable. Drive access sounds continued. Hmm. Was it doing a RAID array check? No. Did it, uh, like catch a virus or something? No.

It turned out the power supply fan was rattling. This is a $1.99 part inside a $700 device. Since that device, moreover, was now holding hundreds of gigabytes of my precious data, I didn't really feel like mailing it back to Buffalo for repair.

My only option was to replace the fan. I guessed that it was an 80x25mm case fan with a 3-pin power connector, so I bought one at my local grocery-store-turned-computer-retailer. I disassembled the Terastation, removing all 240 screws (OK, I exaggerate. There are only 180 screws). I took apart the power supply and discovered that the fan actually had a 2-pin power connector -- it was missing the yellow connector that I suspect is for speed monitoring. So I clipped the old fan's connector and soldered it to the new one. I reassembled everything (well, almost everything; I had one piece left over at the end that now sits next to the Terastation), plugged it back in, and it worked, quietly.

So if your Terastation's fan starts acting up, and you're comfortable soldering wires together, this is a straightforward repair job. Other than the soldering, it's no more difficult than a drive replacement, which the user manual describes how to do.

This is the story of how I broke my game.

When I try to look through the backs of my opponents' cards, I usually see nothing but bicycles or crosshatch patterns. Every once in a while I correctly guess what someone's holding, but it's due to fear of monsters under the bed more than astute deductions. In any event my guess is usually too late to benefit from it. An example might be a loose opponent's reraise of my KQ on a Q-high board: OK, I'm starting to believe he has AQ, but I'm pot-committed, so all I get to do at this point is call and see it.

Despite my card myopia, I was on a pretty good upward trend a week or two ago. By applying straightforward late-tourney strategy, I frequently survived the bubble, and then through unbridled aggression frightened my opponents into giving up second or even first place. I nearly quadrupled my original bankroll at the peak and was feeling confident.

But rather than falling prey once again to the Peter Principle, I took a break. I sat in with a $1.00 buyin at a $0.01/$0.02 no-limit table. I resolved to ignore the monsters under the bed and not fold my cards unless an opponent had told me a consistent story about why he was beating me.

Obviously, this required me to pay attention to those stories, which I did. And I discovered a couple interesting things.

• Amazingly enough, stories don't always make sense. Example #1: if you really did hit that ace-high flop as hard as your bet suggests, why did you limp preflop? I don't have an ace, either, but I'll reraise you to let you know I think you're full of crap, and what do you know, you fold. Example #2: your big bet represents that the turned board pair helped you. So you're telling me that you checked a junk board on the button with a pair on the flop? Nope, I don't think so. I'll call.
• If you develop theories that suggest it's worthwhile to stay in the hand, you are more likely to stay in the game and find that the turn or river improves your hand. Continuing Example #2, I call your turn bet, and hey, the river gives me top two pair, ha ha ha. These are the kinds of events that usually occur only when we're both cowards (in the sense that we're afraid of post-flop play) and move all-in to make sure we get to see the full board.
• Card-reading isn't always about knowing what your opponent has. Sometimes it's simply a matter of eliminating some of his possible holdings. That can be enough for you to conclude that your seemingly poor hand still has him beat. This is especially fun when you cold-call to the river and beat AK with T5 on a 925JJ board.

If you've been through this experience before, you might know what happens next. You feel invincible. Suddenly a 92o is a completely playable hand. Every cheap flop is worth seeing. You become the guy who keeps pot odds low for the straight/flush drawing hands (even though you yourself have nothing), which you feel entitled to do simply because you've correctly identified that they're on draws.

This was tremendously fun for a while, especially when I made seemingly impossible calls for most of my stack on the river and exposed my opponents' broken draws or dangling high cards. However, a few days after moving back to my $6.50 SNG games, things fell apart. To my opponents' credit, they identified me as a classic LAG (loose-aggressive) player, and tightened up. It's hard to improve with 92o against QQ, even if you do hit the flop. And combined with the big bets that typically accompany the low-buyin turbos, my new playing style meant that a single mistake early in the game pretty much crippled me, making cashes extremely unlikely.

It turns out that I'm not the first to have evolved into this trap. Explains Ray Zee:

This is the advanced stage of a poker player's career. Now the cat is out of the bag. He wins more often and gets what he believes is the right feel for the game. Great plays come about by pushing marginal hands and making fantastic calls on the end through his ability to read hands. Poker is fun played this way. But no longer is the tight player inside the body. All hands start to look like they have value, and with skillful manipulation winning the pot is easy. He begins to believe that he can play bad hands for profit where in reality he can't. The player has taken a big step backward and a long leap forwards at the same time. The tight style needed is gone and a new imaginative style is born and he becomes loose aggressive. Unfortunately for him, if he gets too loose he loses all his money and may never recover. But for those that are moving up the ladder, this is the last leap before the finishing stage.

Except for the "this is the advanced stage" part of this quote, this describes precisely how I feel. Internally, I was hyper-aware of what's going on at the table, but externally I was the practical equivalent of a coin dispenser.

So I took a few days off, re-read Harrington, and then last night returned to the game as a tight player. Two cashes out of three tournaments, 1st place and 2nd place. I made a couple great calls that I probably would have folded two weeks ago, so not all my newfound abilities are lost. It's too small a sample size to reach any conclusions, but it's certainly better than losing. We'll see what happens next.