Darkened Poker

I have been reading a bunch of articles lately that have advocated not playing in games that are under your normal “buy in” based on the theory you will not take is seriously and pick up bad habits which you will carry over into your larger game.  Bad habits and leaks in your game as we all know can cost you a lot of your bankroll in short order.

My first thought was these guys were complete idiots and I could not understand how they would be spreading such bad advice.  It would be like telling a grand master chess player that they could never play anyone worst than them because it would ruin their master level game.  Only because I had seen enough such articles from enough different respected players did I give it some thought before I completely wrote the whole idea off.

Upon further reflection I see were they are coming from; that is great advice if you’re an instinct player. Instinct players that do not reason out the entire hand in their conscious mind before acting but instead relay on the subconscious to take the most commonly traveled path in their mind for the situation and give them the answer.  If you muddy the water a little by have multiple paths for the seemingly same situation then your mind will seemingly randomly give you different answers.

So these players indeed would have to be careful to not play a lot outside their normal environment or they will train their brain muscle to have the wrong tendencies for awhile.  If you look at other reaction based sports like baseball it would be equivalent of suddenly giving a batter a much heavier bat.  He is going to swing low on the ball for quite awhile before the brain creates a new muscle memory to compensate.   If the batter goes back and forth enough they can learn to use both just as effectively after awhile.  But during that in between time they are not going to be using either very effectively.

In poker this training process to get the instinctive brain to recognize and respond correctly to both situations can be very expensive.  Most people are not willing to wait through it and thus write articles warning others not to do it.  As a side note this is also why some people drop down in levels after running bad for awhile but it does not change their results right away.  They continue to lose money as they instinctively make decisions for the wrong level until they re-learn the old forgotten pathways.

If you’re not a instinctive player then this is just bad advice in general.  Since your conscious thought process already goes through a decision tree of considering all paths for each action you are not really training any one path more than another in any type of game.  So play in whatever games you want.  You might not challenge yourself as much or maximize your hourly EV by playing smaller games.  But they are not going to hurt your game, they can be a lot of fun and are a cheap way to try out different playing styles and see how people react.

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Darkened Poker

So I am goofing around at a small work cash game with my good friend Mick when there is a small raise which Mick calls so I have to call.  The implied tilt odds if I win this pot from Mick with 72 is huge.

Flop comes down in this picture from right to left and I flop a open ended str8 draw so I call the bet 1$ bet on the flop.

Turn gives me the low str8 flush but str8 flush never the less and I am hoping someone has the Ace or King and I will get payed.  I call another 1$ bet as I have position on Mick and can get a good re-raise in on the river.

River pairs the board which makes me a little sad as it might slow down the nut flush and I can not re-raise quite as much.  Mick leads out with another 1$ bet and I re-raise to 3.5$.  The Pocket KK’s calls and then Mick starts mumbling to himself and says out loud that I probably have the 2♥ but then moves all in.

Dam…  Usually when he talks about hands that he is putting you on it he can beat them, it is a big tell of his.  I do not like it but I have to call, the pocket KK’s finally realizes he is beat and folds.  Mick asks me what I got so I flip my 2 and the table explodes and the KK flips his card to show how unlucky he is.   I am still watching Mick because he has not mucked yet and I am now pretty sure I know what is coming.

Sure enough he waits till it quiets down and has everyone attention before he says “So you got a str8 flush” and then finally turns over his larger one.  Slow rolled for maximum tilt, that is my good friend Mick…

That's why you don't play 72!

I hear you buddy, you want slow rolling tilt war.  Its on

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Darkened Poker

So it had to be this way, with success comes the eventual downfall, one gets too confident, optimizes their plan a little for extra extraction.  Suddenly exposes some holes in the armor and when dealing with sharks like the TiltBoys, your throat can only be exposed for a second before they have it.  Thus I got cleaned out like so many before, why would I be any different.

So I had heard all the tales, Dice boy is the luckiest man alive.  It does not matter how many outs he has, he will get there.  They all said “If are in a pot with him, just fold early and keep the pot small so you do not loose even more money to him later”.  In my previous games I had seen him hit against Perry, Ralph and Phil and crush them after the money was all in and he was way behind.  I had seen the tilt it induced and the table suddenly light on fire.

Yet I could not help myself, there I sat with the nut str8 in blogass ( omaha h/l with 6 cards and a twist ), two flush cards sat on the flop.  Dice boy bet 150 and was called before it got to me, what can you do.  You can not call and let them both draw for cheap, if you push all in you will get called by the str8 flush wrap around draw and would be slightly behind.  So I tried to re-raise enough to get rid of the bare str8 or flush draw but leave myself the ability to fold if needed on the turn.  Sure enough Dice boy though for awhile and then called, he was undecided to call and let the others in or re-raise all in with his massive draw.

Sure enough the turn is the 3 rd flush card, I check and he moves me all in.  Of course he hit it, i think for a little while but i have to fold.  I have seen way to many people pay him off and can not join their ranks.  I fold and he shows me med flush, it was risky just flat calling can letting a better flush draw in.  But things seem to work out for him a lot.

Well he did that to me a few more times and I was starting to go on tilt.  Normally if I have having a bad run and do not have a good table image I get the hell up and go home.  But sadly I was there on business and could not leave yet.  Dice Boy then busts another Tiltboy that re-raised all in against him, so now he had table images as the finisher and was betting a lot.  Given my tight image so far I had to start calling down against people because they were calling every raise and coming after me, and then betting every time a scare card fell.  Even a Lucky Chances Fish would have started bluffing against me the way I had been playing up to that point.

The was the beginning of the end for me.  Every time I had to look one of these guys up, they had it and more.  They were running good and I was running bad, I felt like Daniel Negreanu on High stacks poker looking at Gus Hansens Quads over and over again all night.  Thanks for holding my money for me TiltBoys.  But easy come and easy go.  I will be back to even the score.  Not even Dice Boy can run that lucky forever.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

After teaching my friends all these crazy games and spending a month playing them during our lunch break, I though I knew what I was doing.  I found another excuse to get into the next Tiltboy home game and was off.  Boy did I get lucky, for the first 1/2 hour before everyone showed up we played Omaha h/l and I could not loose a hand.  That was good it gave me a little extra confidence before we got into the Tiltboy home brew games.  When we did get into the crazy games they only introduced one completely new game and only 2 new variations to the other ones.  Since I was not totally bogged down with learning I did not have to fold almost every hand and could play a lot more.  It was great, once you know these games you realized they are designed for pure crazy fun.  The declare and another round of betting is pure evil, the person that finds themselves the only one on the high or low side gets to bet the max and delight in the groan’s of pain as everyone else puts in their money hoping their not quartered or completely out.

All the games they play are ante games, they have this rule that if the dealer does not put in the ante before he is done dealing cards, he has to double the ante.  I must of caught Phil and Dice boy on it a dozen times that night.  Now I understand the name Tiltboy, when someone is stuck a couple of thousand and you call them on double antes a bunch of times in a row.  You can literally see the steam coming off them.  And in this group, if you look like you might be tilting even a little bit, everyone comes after you.  The only good night in there minds is when someone has bought in several times and has to get up and walk it off just to keep from going off the handle.  If it is Phil Gordon then it is extra satisfying and the table gets really excited.  Not sure if it is just because he is the pro or there is another inside story I do not know.

It looks all care free and fun but don’t let that fool you, it is your typical shark filled semi-pro game.  Someone takes a bad beat the mind games start and the rest immediately start convincing him that he played it wrong.  Start running bad they come after you and put you to the test.  Split the pot in a hand and they try to ro-sham-bo you for the whole pot.  Never ro-sham-bo these guys for anything, I never won a split pot in 5 hours.  If you want to have a little fun, split most of the pot and then ro-sham-bo them for the smaller leftover amount.

Then we got to the no limit part and this time I was up and could afford to stay.  What a completely different environment as one would expect.  A no limit split pot game gets very large very quickly.  They allow you to pull part of your buy in behind the line for each hand so your not risking it all right from the beginning.  But people are still getting busted every few hands and there are more buy ins and more tilt than you can keep track.  Once again I was way out of my level and had to resort to playing super tight again.  Still by far the most fun I have ever had at a poker table in my short poker career.

I finally left a little bit up, much to their disappointment I am sure.  Can’t wait to try again.  Which I did in “Round three”

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

It was 3 years ago now, but events like that you do not forget.  I was trying to get a console poker game with TiltBoy Phil Gordon going at Secret level just after it was bought by Sega.  It never got off the ground but that is another bad beat story for another time. The only good thing that came out of it all was I had an excuse to track down and meet these legendary poker players.

He is really big

Phil invited me to his home game to meet the rest of the TiltBoys and people from his company Expert Insight.  Just bring a couple of hundred bucks its a 3 – 6 limit game he said.  At the time did not have a big bankroll so I was happy to hear it was a small game.  But I did think at the time, why are they playing such a small game.  Well the education was just about to start.  The buy in ended up being considerably more than that, so already I was out of my comfort zone and playing scared money.  But as I was about to find out that should have been the least of my worries.

They do not play normal poker, in fact they rarely play the same poker for more that a month or so before they change it again.  There are so many rules and so many things to forget that even though they have been playing it for 20 years, they still get it wrong and dispute large pot on technicalities.  Then they make bets on the right way to play it, someone loses a hundred or so more because of all the side bets.  To settle the bets they often end up voting on who is right or sometimes they check out their completely outdated web page of rules.  But this is part of the charm, they are looking for ways to put people on tilt, and side bets are a very quick way.  In fact every game is specifically designed to allow for massive action, great suck outs,  scoops, getting quartered, complexity and anything else which could put people on more tilt.

They also have this crazy concept of tilt cap, instead of waiting for multiple rounds to cap a betting round, any two people can just announce tilt-cap and it is 4 bet for anyone that wants to call.  It makes the game play faster, but it seems to run against their other love which is getting dead money in the pot.  Tilt capping can allow other to escape before putting even a single bet in, not sure it is worth the trade off.

I spend a the first hour trying to figure out the details of Anthrax, Shit & Spit, Ding a ling, Chinese poker, and progressive double handed ro-sham-bo.  The first three all had variations such as Stupid Parry rules, buy backs, Austrian rules, with a twist, role your own, show game style, and most had declares which allowed some very interesting tilt inducing strategies and another round of betting.

Well if you do not know what your doing, play tight so you loose the least and that is what I did.  After a few hours I was only down 100 and happy as hell I was only down that much.  They announce they are going to switch up to no limit and I realize that even playing tight is not going to save me now.  I took my chance to exit having sat with the big boys and not lost my shirt.  It was great, all I could think about was teaching my friends the games so I could practice up and go play again.  Which I did in “Round two”

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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Darkened Poker