Friday’s Caption Competition

It’s caption competition time again. But before that, here’s the password to the Freddie Mays tournament at 8pm tonight:

djokovic

Onto this week’s competition and keeping with the week’s tennis theme I found this pic. They say you know you’re getting older when policemen start looking younger. Well you could say the same about pervs.   What might he be saying/thinking?

Congratulations to Mick Kelly who won last week’s competition with the caption: “And the winner of the extreme strip poker championship is…..”

Anyone for Tennis? (Part I of II)

Take any poker player at the end of the month or the end of the year and ask him:  “would you rather have won more or lost less in that period?”

and you will very likely get the answer “I couldn’t care either way”.  After all, cash is cash and winning more or losing less equates to the same thing, doesn’t it?

But if you take this perfectly logical thinking and add another piece of accepted poker wisdom, we seem to arrive at a contradiction.  We are taught to play poker aggressively: be selective with your starting hands and play them strongly. Bet and raise with them rather than calling. Being aggressive (and not passive) is the staple theme of nearly all books on poker.

So we all want to maximise our wins and minimise our losses and we agree that an aggressive style is the best.  The trouble is you can’t simultaneously be going all out for profit and avoiding loss at the same time. So which is more important – trying to win money or stopping yourself losing it? Well which is it to be?

In this article I’m going to make the case for playing “defensively”.

To help explain this I’m going to borrow a tennis analogy that I recently read.  Now I know a lot of sporting analogies are a steaming pile of turd but I was so taken with this one that I just had to steal it.  This really does apply to poker, especially the sort of games I’ve been finding myself playing lately.

But I ought to clarify up front. Playing “defensively” is not the same thing as playing “passively” so we shouldn’t confuse the two.

Consider the tennis that you’ve been watching in the Australian Open the past couple of weeks.  This type of tennis is a “winner’s” game where the match goes to the player who is able to hit the most winners: fast paced, well placed shots that their opponent can’t return.

Now the professional tennis player is so good that he can make the shot he wants to hit virtually all the time: hard or soft, deep or short, left or right, flat or with spin. Professional players aren’t troubled by the sort of thing that makes the game difficult for amateurs: bad bounces, wind, speed, stamina, skill, or an opponent’s efforts to put the ball beyond reach. The pro can get to most shots that their opponent hits and do what they want with the ball once they get to it. In fact the pros can do this so consistently that that statisticians keep track of the rare exceptions they fail to do this under the heading “unforced errors”

But the tennis the rest of us play is a “loser’s” game, with the match going to the player who hits the fewest losers. The winner just keeps the ball in pay and waits for his opponent to hit it out of the court or into the net. In other words, points in amateur tennis aren’t won; they are lost.

Now I don’t know about you, but I recognise from this description the type of tennis game that I try to play…(to be continued on Monday)

Poll of the Week

Keeping in theme with Eoghan O’Dea’s tennis betting blogs I’ve got a tennis related poll of the week for you. While I was in Sydney I was introduced to a friend of a friend who told me that he was a tennis umpire when I asked him what he did. “What sort of games do you umpire” I asked him.  ”Wimbledon, the US Open,  that sort of thing” he casually replied. And I thought he was too young to be a proper umpire!  So right now he’s in Melbourne officiating the Aussie Open.

I just had to ask him which player was the most abusive and gives the umpires the hardest time these days. I couldn’t believe it when he told me that it is STILL John Mcenroe. Mac just can’t help abusing officials, even though he is 52 and only plays charity games (makes him a bit of a tit I suppose.)

But I wanted to know which of the modern players was the most unpleasant to officiate. So he told me. This week’s poll is a right or wrong answer. Pick from the following seven players to answer the question “Which male tennis player is the modern scourge of the Umpires?”

Answer this week’s poll and leave a comment with your Twitter username to be in with a chance of winning a token to my bounty game.

Congratulations to Claire Taylor (@delibobble on Twitter – for winning last week’s poll.)

Hand of the Week – Week 26

Last Thursday and yesterday I told you how a Canadian chap I met in Brazil told me that the best game of poker in the whole world (as in easiest to beat) took place at Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast in Australia.  Armed with this nugget of gold I made a point of finding this game when I came to Aus.

So you can imagine my disdain when having discovered this game and played three sessions in it I found myself a small loser. Harrumph!

This could suggest one of three things:

1 – The Canadian was bullshitting me

2 – The Canadian was telling the truth but the game has since changed

3 – I am not very good at poker

Right now any of the three explanations could be the correct one.  But read further on and I suspect you’ll probably lean towards number 3.  So onto this week’s hand, where I shall be brief for the following reasons:

1 – I hate the hand and don’t really want to dwell on it

2 – It’s getting late and I’m tired after a hard days frolicking at Wet n wild Theme park

3 – I only have 40 minutes battery left on my laptop. Plugging it in entails moving to the living room of the hostel, where some lairy bell end is drunkenly holding court and every word that leaves his mouth increasingly makes me want to punch him.

Seeing as this article is turning into “lists of three reasons” for whatever needs explaining, I may as well do likewise for the three reasons I am a donkey and label them “Pre – Flop”, “Flop” and “Turn”, where I bluff every time, each time with spectacularly less success. The game is $2-5 and I have about $375.

Preflop – the grizzly old guy who is a bit lively preflop raises to 20. He gets called by a Chinese player in middle position who seems to call most preflop raises. I have made precisely one three bet all night – with KK where everyone folded. This time I get Q-10 offsuit in the small blind and I decide to try and steal the $40 that’s out there. Older grizzly guy made an amazing lay down earlier so I suspect he will lay down again. I raise to $75. He does indeed fold but the Chinese player calls the $75. There’s $177 in the pot. Heads up to the flop we go.

Flop – the flop was 8-7-2 rainbow.” Well he can’t have any of that can he?” I reason and I fire off another $75. To my increasing inconvenience he calls. Well that wasn’t supposed to happen. There is $327 in the pot.

Turn –The turn card is a Jack and none of my bluffs have worked so far. So the obvious thing to do is try another bluff. Third time lucky perhaps? Well that’s what Baldrick would do. And I’ve got a gutshot straight draw now….. why not? Do it man!

I smash all in for my last $225

He calls. The river is an Ace for 8-7-2-J-A

“What have you got” says the cheeky sod.

At this point I hear Grizzly in the corner predicting to his mate “Kings or Aces for sure”

And I flip over my Q-10. Grizzly looks dumfounded.

Why oh why did I do that? I mean of course, why did I flip over my Q-10? I ought to have mucked them and walked away. It’s the the triumph of hope over experience I suppose. There’s no way I’m ever ahead there but against all possible odds I still hoped there was some tiny chance he missed his draw and that I was ahead.

But of course I’m not. The Chinese guy has….10c9c for the immortal nuts*.

And I just gave away all my money.

* hence he is a cheeky sod, asking me “what have you got” in a tone that suggested he urgently needed to know

Eoghan O Dea Blog – Aussie Open Week 2 Betting preview !

Ive been over in Australia for about 9 days now. I havent played a huge amount of poker really. I wanted to play a few tournaments before the main event but only got to play one which was the 1k rebuys. I was in for 4k which wasnt too bad considering how crazy it was and with it having a treble add on at the end. I ran pretty well until the last 3 tables where i passed a few hands that maybe i should of played and then ended getting my money in with jjs v’s Ak which possibly wasnt that necassary. If i won maybe it would of been necessary! Overall im winning a little as i won in the 3 cash games sessions that i have played. Im playing in the main event 2moro which im looking forward to. Its goin to be a big turnout as usual and has a juicy 2 million guaranteed 1st prize.

Ive been punting quite a lot on the tennis over here. I think im back to levels after a bad day today with Tipsarevic and Raonic both loosing. Im goin to get on the Gasquet band wagon for his next match vs ferrer. Im usually always laying gasquet but hes being v impressive so far and ferrer not as impressive this tournament. Its looking like were goin to get some v interesting quarter final matches where there will be no big favourites at that stage really which will be good.

Its like 2am now so gona see if i can to sleep early for a change. Ill do a bit of tweeting tomorrow during the tournament hopefully. No excuse with the free wireless at the crown casino!

I Think I Found “the” Game

Last Thursday I wrote that my challenge was simple – find the game – beat the game.

At that point in time I was still trying to find the game, wandering around Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast getting sunburned.  And it was not just any game I was trying to find either. It was “THE game”.  To hear tell of, this was the easiest game you could ever wish to play.

Well eventually I achieved half of my task – the wrong half though!

Let’s just say I haven’t beaten the game yet. I’ve only won one of my three sessions there, although I am only a tiny loser so far overall.  But at first I wasn’t even sure that I had even found the game. When I compared the evidence of my own eyes to what had been promised to me by that Canadian guy back in Brazil a year ago, I started to wonder “Have I been mis-sold THE game?”

The game that he told me about was the liveliest, loosest, easiest-to-win-at game of poker that you ever heard of. Full of fish! Galahs galore! Players literally giving their money away!

But that wasn’t the game that I came across.  With a couple of notable exceptions (of which more to come later), the players weren’t in the habit of giving all their money away to me or anyone else for that matter. So I wondered if I was at the wrong place and whether “THE” game was actually some other game.

Alas no. Having asked around and searched online, this pretty much has to be the game in question. One of the regulars who I have seen at Jupiter’s every time I’ve been there assured me there is nothing else going on along the Gold Coast and the next game is all the way up at Brizzy (Brisbane – an hour’s drive North).

So unless the Canadian was talking about some home game (which I find very unlikely) then yes, I have indeed found “the” game.  And having travelled 12000 miles to find the supposedly bestest game in the whole universe, I have to say I feel a bit let down.

The obvious candidate for “the game” was Jupiter’s Casino, which is part of a big hotel complex. And I wasn’t massively impressed with it. Although it claims to be a 5 star establishment, it doesn’t look like one. It is decent, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a patch on the Star City in Sydney, which you can really tell is a five star. This in turn means that the Jupiter probably isn’t a tenth as good as the Crown in Melbourne (where they play the Aussie Millions). I still haven’t been there but I’ve heard from untold sources that the Crown is the absolute nuts.

But who cares how good a casino is? It’s not like I go to a casino to play the table games: I only care for the poker.  The Jupiter poker room only has space for 10 tables and when I got there at 4pm on a Friday there were only two tables in action. There was a $1/2 game and a $2/4 game with a maximum $300 buy in (although a $2.50/5 game started at about 7pm with a $500 max).  In three visits I have not seen more than four tables open at once. Compare that to the Star where there were 20 tables in action at 2am on a Friday night/Saturday morning.

However, the Jupiter has its advantages. There is no table charge and the rake is 5% instead of 10%, although there is no cap so it can get as high as $50 on a $1000 pot (it is capped at $10 in the Star). I have to say the $10 per hour table charge they make you stump up at the Star is the single most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in a cash game so I’m at least grateful I don’t have to pay that at Jupiter’s.

The poker room itself is surrounded by noisy slot machines and banging loud music, something that annoys and amuses the players in equal measure.

“Can you ask them to turn up this banging music please?” joked one player to the dealer.

“Come on man, turn it up! Can’t you see the clientele want it louder?” he persisted, pointing to a geriatric old girl who was hunched over a fruit machine having a coughing fit.

Given the demographic of the slot playing clientele – they are all old ladies without exception – it is a particularly odd scenario to hear techno playing at that volume.

But I don’t so much mind the conditions so long as the game is good, namely that the people playing it are bad at poker.  So you can imagine my displeasure at this amazing fold I saw:

At the river the board was showing four hearts, thus:

Ah 10h 5h 3h 3c

The flop had been checked and there was a smidgeon of action on the turn. On the river there was about $200 in the pot and the guy from Melbourne who had about $2200 bet $110. His grizzly tight opponent thought for ages and then raised to $290.

“All in” said the bloke from Melbourne in a flash.

The grizzly bloke had less than $300 left. After some bitching and moaning he finally folded his hand face up – King Queen of hearts for the best flush. It was around $260 to win about $1150. And he folded!  Incredible stuff.

The guy from Melbourne showed his A3 for the full house. Say what you will about the fold and the pot odds and the fact it was a cash game, but at the end of the day the bloke folded the best possible flush and he saved just under $300! Now if this was really a good game the man would stack off in an instant there. Even some good players will call out of sheer frustration there!

And this is supposed to be a good game?

Hmmm. I think I’ve been mis-sold ”the game” here…..

Friday’s Caption Competition

It’s caption competition time again. But before that, here’s the password to the Freddie Mays tournament at 8pm tonight:

surfersp

The tournament might well start at 8pm start where you reside but I can assure you it is nothing like a social hour on my side of the world. It’s been 7am starts on Saturday mornings up to now (ridiculous enough as it is) but now that I’ve moved time zone a further hour by coming to the Gold Coast, ridiculous o’clock just became obscene o’clock! I’ll be playing it at 6am! Great fun for me hey?

Anyway, I saw this picture and I found it topical because the other day we had this dealer who was painfully slow. He must have only been dealing 20 hands an hour. I reckon he must have been downing cocktails of valium and laughing gas because as well as being slow he was really smiley and found everything hilarious.  Nice for him, but boy, he was slow. If he’d gotten any slower we could have ended up like this:

Please submit your entry to @paddypowerpoker on Twitter for a chance to win a token to my bounty game. Congratulations to @theblackrose84 on twitter for winning last week’s competition with ‘damn that bitch lady gaga, she stole my poker face’.

Find The Game – Beat The Game

Find the game, beat the game. That’s how the saying goes.

And today the operative word has been “finding”.  I’ve bailed from Sydney and I’m now in Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast, Queensland.

And I’m here to play poker. I came here on the advice of a total stranger who described himself as a recreational player who was roughly breakeven on the cash games online. But when it came to Surfer’s Paradise he won almost every day at the $2-5 game. He had gone out there to live with some student friends and surf for three months but once he found this game he spent nearly all his time at the Casino coining it in and funding his trip. He said he very rarely lost.

I stayed with this character – a Canadian bloke – in a hostel in Salvador for two days. I’m pretty sure he won’t remember having that conversation with me and I can’t even remember his name.  Seeing that he could have made every word up, I suppose you could say I’m taking a bit of a flyer coming here on his say so. I mean, the North American suggests to the European in South America that he goes to Australia to find a game of poker – and he does! It’s a bit ridiculous when you think about it, but I believe him.

And who needs the internet anyway?

I’ve never been to the Gold Coast  but it’s a bit more touristy than most places I’ve been to before. Just walking around at lunchtime people were trying to persuade me to come to their nightclubs with promises of this that and the other.  All I can say is anyone who is touting for a character like me to go in their nightclub must run a pretty shit nightclub. (Come to think that’s what I actually should say next time some pest accosts me in the street.)

But it’s got lovely beaches and beautiful girls and I mean they are smoking hot, steaming, to the extent that I’ve coined “Freddie’s Law”, neatly plagiarised from an old saying. They say you are never more than 10 feet away from a rat/Man Utd fan in London (delete as appropriate). Well at Surfer’s Paradise you’re never more than 10 feet from a well tasty, smoking hot, Aussie chick. And I don’t use the word “law” lightly. I challenge any man to come out here and prove otherwise.

By the way it was the quickest flight I ever took to get here, taking off from Sydney at 9pm and landing at the Gold Coast at 9.01pm (something to do with the time difference perchance?)

So would you have any sympathy for me if I told you I got sunburned today? Didn’t think so.

I did what I usually do when I move to a new area – go wandering about and just follow my nose to see what I can find. I also had to traipse around a bit to find a new hostel as the one I ended up in is a bit of a hole (looked great on the internet though!) And of course I had to find this poker game.

Well I ended up walking 4km before having a little sunbathe on the beach and then walking the 4km back. So now I’m beetroot coloured and about to peel. Oh, and I still didn’t find the casino.

I suppose it would have helped if the Canadian had ever told me the name of the casino.

Find the Game – beat the game. Quite!

Poll of the Week

I witnessed a very funny incident in the poker room at the casino last week. It wasn’t funny as in “har har”, more like funny as in “Did he really just do that?”

This guy walked into the poker room and stopped to look around. Clearly he was there to play poker and he was searching for his table. Now just as he was doing this another man marched up to him full of pupose from behind and said to him:

“You should wash your hands before you play poker”.

“I beg your pardon” said the first bloke to the stranger who had just accosted him.

The guy repeated, louder this time “I said you should wash your hands after you have been to the toilet before you play poker”.

I couldn’t quite hear the response but the first bloke didn’t look too happy and he let this be known to the man who was berating him about his hygiene. Now in the Star casino the toilets are a good 75 metres walk from the poker room. So Mr overzealous-with-a-bee-in-his-bonnet-about-clean-hands has actually followed him all that way back into the poker room and waited until he was slap bang in the throng of the tables to pick his moment to berate him. I personally heard this exchange from 15 feet away and they were stood between a load of other tables so at least twenty or thirty other people must have heard all this.

I’ll give OCD boy his due: if you’re going to be a zealot, do it properly. And he was certainly doing it properly.

I mean yeah he’s got a point, but just how much damage can a tiny speck of human piss really do anyway once it’s been transferred to the chip via the cloth to the pot and back to the cloth and then possibly to another hand etc etc?  I’ve played 16 hours at the Sahara in Las Vegas and I’m still alive.

If you’re that bothered by minor issues of personal hygiene you may as well start wearing a mask and sleeping in an oxygen tent with your pet monkey and being a freak for the rest of your life mainlining propofol until you finally kill yourself.

So this week’s question is:  How would you have reacted to being accosted like that? (And no pretending you’ve never done it!)

Answer this week’s poll and leave a comment with your Twitter username to be in with a chance of winning a token to my bounty game.

Congratulations to Paul Burke (long time no hear!) – @PaulBurkeOnline on Twitter – for winning last week’s poll. There were some good comments on last week’s poll, particularly regards “The Shield” from @theblackrose. And I will be watching Love Hate, Game of Thrones, and Spartacus because I’ve never seen them. Thank you to @pflemingg, @djdave2001 and @favopoker for those comments.

Hand of The Week – Week 25

Never judge a book by its cover.

The old adage constitutes good advice in life generally but it is especially true at the poker table, as the following hand demonstrates.

I was playing a live game last week where there were two Chinese players at the table. I’d not been there long so I didn’t know anything about either of them. But judging by the look of them – and this can be fatal in poker – they were very different characters.

One was cocky and youthful, doing chip tricks and generally full of beans. He may have been Chinese but he was completely “Ozzified” shall we say. The other Chinese guy was in his 60s – even 70 perhaps – and he was looking quietly reserved and composed, a veritable wise old owl. He had a healthy stack of about $600 – no doubt won with judicious bets and raises, I thought, using all that wisdom he’d gained through the years.  And so I judged the book by its cover….quite wrongly as it happens.

To summarise just how badly I’d misjudged him, I shall call him “Mr Myagi” from here on in.

They got involved in a big pot when Mr Myagi raised to $7 preflop from and the young guy flat called in late position after a couple of other callers had got in before him.

The flop came down Jd 8d 4h and Mr Myagi led out for $25. The two other players folded and the action was on the youngster. He promptly announced “Raise!” and made it $75 to go.

Back to Mr Myagi, whom I was confident would see this raise for what it was – strength!

He was thinking, dipping into those reserves of wisdom no doubt, using mind power that Yoda himself would be proud of….

“I call” he said and put ten $5 chips into the pot.

“Surely he’s got a set”, I said to myself.  The turn was a 10c for a board of:

Jd 8d 4h 10c

The action was on Mr Myagi again.

“All in!” he announced, not pronouncing either “L” in “all”.

Now it was back to the Ozzified Chinese lad, who had a decision to make for the rest of his stack. “Surely Myagi wins this”, I thought. “He has to have this, the lad has to fold”.  He gave it a minutes thought and then called, but he wasn’t happy. The river was an offsuit 5 which gave a board of:

Jd 8d 4h 10c 5s

Myagi showed his hand – Jack Ten for two pair

The young lad turned over his loser with some disappointment – Ace Jack.

And he was entitled to feel disappointed – disgusted even. He raised to $75 on the flop to tell Mr Myagi that he had a big hand and still Myagi called $50 and sucked out on him.  But if he was disgusted with Myagi’s play, that was nothing compared to how he must have felt when he finally spoke….

“ah ace Jack” he said knowingly, adopting the wise owl persona

I thought he was about to impart some wisdom….but instead he unleashed the immortal line:

”I KNEW you had ace Jack”

On the spot at least three of us started laughing at him.  I mean it’s just risible. If Myagi “knew” the lad had ace jack, why the hell does he call $50 more on the flop knowing he is beaten?

So much for my judgement!  So much for the wise old owl crap!

He was just a half-wit calling station who talked a load of shit!