Is it just me, or does it seem like Lee High School makes the news a lot more often than other schools?  It’s been that way for as long as I can remember…

I have less interest in the NFL than Ryan Seacrest has interest in women, but even I can’t resist the temptation to gamble on the big game.  So I am in a proposition bet pool and a squares pool.  The former involves some skill; the later involves none.

The squares pool is $300 per square.  Quarters pay $3,000.  Final score is worth $20,000.  Charity gets $1,000.

I bought a $50 interest in each of two squares.  Because of the charity, my $100 was worth $96,67 before they drew the squares.  Then they drew the squares, and I got:

Saints 9 – Colts 1 and  Saints 7 – Colts 9

Using the odds here, The expected value went from $96.67 to about $56.  A better source (which considers that each quarter has different weighting reveals that the value is closer to $55.50.  So, I have lost $45.50 already, and the game hasn’t even started!

The props pool I entered is fairly simple.  You place a set amount on every prop bet in the pool (53 in total) and whoever wins the most wins the pool.  Top five spots pay out.  Not knowing squat about the NFL but knowing a thing or two about pools, I figured that the best strategy was, to the fully extent possible, make picks that are highly correlated with each other.  So, I picked the props that would come through if Indy lit up the scoreboard.  One of my longer odds props is that Austin Collie will score the first touchdown.  This was largely arbirtrage on the current odds (12:1) compared to the pool odds (15:1).

Go Colts!

To be perfectly honest, I probably won’t watch the first 3 quarters of the game since it is on during dinner, bed and bath for the kids.  But I’ll tune in to see if the final score is Colts 39, Saints 17.  If so, it’ll be chicken dinner at the Fro house.

This is a little bit funny.  Evidentyly, 13,000 shirts claiming UT as the BCS National Champion are headed to Haiti.

Even though the Longhorns lost the game, Ellis and many others believe this act is a victory to provide clothing to people in dire need of supplies right now. “There’s certainly a win here,” she said.

Oh good.   So we get a win after all.

…but this is pretty darn funny.

Reload on Pokerstars and you can get a free entry (worth $11) to a tournament in which you can win tickets to the Super Bowl.

I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the cash game in Houston over the holidays.

It was one of those evenings that had we filmed it and put cameras on all of the hole cards, we would probably never run out of material to discuss on this blog.

For starters, I completely misjudged how it would play out. As a reminder, we played small blinds ($1-$3) NL, but we had a $1,000 buy-in. You might have guessed that the buy-in would have very little impact on the texture of the game. In fact, you might have guessed (which I did) that it would (ironically) reduce the amount of action, as the fear of getting felted would provide a deterrent for playing middling hands in a big pot. But to think that would have happened, you would have to suspend all knowledge of what lunatic gamblers my friends are.

To be honest, I didn’t expect much from the Oracle from Omaha (aka The River Chief). When we last played, he was a fairly timid player. The worm has turned, and he is packing an oozie! On the second hand of the night, after being into the pot for $650, he fired another $350 at the pot and got Juan to fold. The table took notice and nobody fucked with the Oracle after that. In fact, it seemed like the first 10 or so hands that he won went uncontested.

I also assumed that Ted “The Poker Nihilist” Hoth would play like a maniac. For about 5 hours, he actually played pretty tight. I’d never seen that before, and it really changed the EV of the game.

To explain one reason I didn’t fare well (and there were many), I think it’s helpful to understand the situation in which I typically do very well. In the (now) common format of $1-$3 with a capped buy-in, either in home games or in casinos, I tend to play very long sessions. That generally means that after a while, I have a monster stack. Even if I have lost and re-bought a lot, at some point I can win a hand and have a big stack (even if it is less than my cumulative buy ins!). So say I have $700 in front of me and most players have around $100-$200, but there are 1 or 2 other guys with stacks about the size of mine. These guys sat down and put in $200 and never really expected to have $700 at risk. If I get in a hand with them, I can usuallly scare the shit out of them. There aren’t many poker situations in which I am uncomfortable. I wish that higher stakes made me nervous (that would be a good deterrent) but I honestly don’t think I play any differently with $700 in front of me than $70. So, here I typically am in a siutation I want to be in… and my opponent is in a situation he didn’t exactly sign up for.

Now contrast that with a $1,000 minimum buy-in game. To have even sat down at the table automatically means that you aren’t afraid of having $1k at risk. I can’t thow out a $250 bet and even get you pause from the story you are telling while you call (or even raise). Nobody is the slightest bit scared of the stakes. Advantage lost.

I suppose that I never fully appreciated just how much of an advantage I typically have in the typical (capped buy in) game until I could contrast it to an uncapped game. Looking back, most of my big scores, particularly in Vegas, came from having a big stack from which I kept firing off bazookas at trembling opponents.

Not only can I typically knock a guy off a hand when the stakes get high, I can also count on a lack of bluffs from my opponents. A guy that doesn’t play very often who finds himself up $500 in a $1-$2 game is not about to give up those chips easily. If he bets, you should assume he has something. In the Houston game, if my opponent bet, it only meant he was still alive.

So, in summary, I intentionally chose a structure that was meant to approximate a situation in which I feel I am favored. I felt that the nuance of starting with a big stack as opposed to waiting for people to, through winning and/or buying back in, build up their stack (thus losing precious poker time!) was in consequential. In fact, it was of great consequence.

Moving on…

I have also usually had a policy of always buying as many chips as possible: either “up to the biggest stack” or up to the cap, depending on the rules. I never understood the guy who plays with a dwindling stack without buying more chips. Invariably, he hits a big hand and doubles up. As happy as he might be, I’d be pissed. After all, the double up would be worth a lot more if you had more chips! I haven’t backed off on my policy, but I have tempered it a bit. Either you consider yourself favored at a table or you don’t. If you do, then you should maximize your EV by maximizing your chips. If you don’t feel you are favored, you should leave. I suppose it doesn’t hurt much to let your stack dwindle some without re-loading. Sometimes you go through a cold streak. I am not talking about any sort of hocus-pocus. Cold streaks may start out due to random bad luck, but once you start losing and others start winning, they will pound on you. Your bluffs are thinly veiled. Your whole image is shot. So it becomes an iterative thing whereby losing begets more losing. It could make sense to temper my enthusiasm to reload to the max in these situations. Wait for a few things to go your way, wait for your image to change, and then (when that EV just picked up) you should re-load. In $200 capped games, this isn’t terribly important, but after playing an uncapped game, I can see the wisdom in waiting to reload just a bit.

Morris bluffed me pretty good on one hand. I don’t remember everything, but it went something like this. I had AJ on the button and I raised pre-flop. The flop came AKT. He checked, I bet big and he called. Don’t recall the turn, but he checked and I think I did, too. Don’t recall the river, but he bet $350. I thought about it forever. What I just couldn’t get past was that I couldn’t conceive of a hand that would call me on the flop that didn’t have me beat on the river. I was going under the (usually safe) assumption that bluffs are typically designed on the river, not master-planned on an earlier street. I folded, and he showed total rags. That meant that he called a big bet on the flop with absolutely nothing. There can only be one reason to do this, and that is exactly what he did. Well played. According to Juan, had I studied his body language, I would have “known” he was bluffing. Maybe. But stuck in the thought that the only bluff I might be facing was a missed draw (i.e., I couldn’t conceive the bluff that was planned several streets in advance), I don’t think that body language alone would have been persuasive.

Junell thought our big hand was the same holdings as the famous hand from 2004. He was right. I guess the long run is officially 69.75 months long.