Completely off the topic of poker, but while our site seems to be the most visited place on the net, it seems that second place goes to jibjab.  You have to see this, you will pee in your pants…plenty of jabs at the right and the left

I will be in Htwon working the full week leading up to Labor Day weekend, and I intend to stick around for the 3 day weekend.  While I doubt that work will allow much poker during the week, please send me an invite if you get something together.

More importantly, if you get a game together on Sunday or Monday (ahem, Junell), please let me know.  I would love to donate

From: “PLANCK, JEFFREY”

To: DrFro & Johnnymac

Subject: Tourney

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 13:35:51 -0500

On Sunday August 8th we are hosting another NL Holdem tourney.  Gary’s house again. $100 buy-in $50 rebuys/addon. Same as before except higher blinds tostart in an effort to get a few more than 2 rebuys.

Please help spread the word.  The more the merrier, etc.

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if interested, I can email you Jeff’s address….I don’t want to post it out on the Net.   Note that Juan Miranda won the last one, so it can’t be too hard to win

I found 7 typos and/or grammatical errors in this article.  As a sport which has only been in the mainstream for a short time and is still dominated by people with less education than a Nebraska football team, poker really suffers from some poor writing.

Some of the poor writers have excellent points, but just can’t write.  How many mistakes can you spot in Mason Malmuth’s Poker Essays?  He is a brilliant &  mathmatically minded man, but the assault he takes on the English language is sickening.  The only things worse are the editor’s errors, which include duplicate pages.  Similiar problems can be found with Sklansky and others.

In addition, there are writers who simply can’t make a point.  The author of the above article mentions The Art of War, goes on a tangent about poker, and then finishes by admitting that he just flipped the first three chapters of the TAoW.

So this brings me to my point, which has been made here before.  If you want to read about poker from people that can write, read Positively Fifth Street first.  Although a big jump down from there, Poker Nation and The Man with $100,000 Breast were written by writers that happen to know poker, not by poker players that happen to have a keyboard.

(Cruising our site for errors is a waste of time.   There is a completely different standard for a stream of consciousness weblog versus a published work.)

More Celebrity Poker.  Although I rag on it, I have to admit that I do watch it.

Underraising (home games)

I promised you a post on underraising, and here it is:

To underraise is to raise a previous bet by an amount less than the previous bet, with the exception of a raise that puts a player all-in*.  It is impossible to underraise in a standard limit poker, as there is no discretion on bet sizes.  In the Gulf Coast casinos that introduced big-bet-on-the-end games like 3-6-12, the concept of underraising lies in the rule that if a guy bets $12 on the river, you can’t come back for $18.  In Mississippi, where you can open pre-flop for $2 or $4, the same logic applies.  In spread limit, it is technically illegal to underraise, and they will stop you if you try in a cardroom.  However, most spread limit these days are on Thursday nights and your neighbor’s house over a case of beer, and nobody ever complains about a 25c raise on a $1.00 bet.

So, the concept of underraising is really only important to Pot-Limit and No-Limit poker.  There are several reasons for the rule, including:

-         An underraise wastes time

-         If there is a limit of 3 raises (not always the case), then this raise limits the total possible amount that could be raised in a round.  As a matter of fact, this is a common strategy in home games in 7-27, where the guy getting middled puts in a raise for the minimum of the spread, while the other 2 put in the max.  So, if it is 25c-$3.00 spread, the total for the round is $6.25, whereas it would be $9.00 if he did not underraise.  This is unfair to the guys with the nut hands

-         It is a Golden Fleece (no pun intended) to colluders.  If A and B are colluding, with C the victim, they would ordinarily need C to be seated between them in order to middle him.  However, if C acts last, A can bet $50, B bet $51, C call, and then A come in for a bigger bet.  With the rule in place, either B makes is $100 and scares off C or simply calls, which gives C the opportunity to call and play for only $50

-         Etc

So, if you find yourself in a game that is allowing underraising (as I did a week ago), you can either point it out and get it fixed, or adjust your game.  I would suggest the latter for two reasons.  First, by pointing it out, you are immediately clueing the table into the fact that you are more knowledgable about poker than they are, which is rarely a profitable table image.  Secondly, they may think you are an ass, and not invite you back.  Thus, let them play w/o the rule and adjust your play to take advantage.

How do you adjust your play?

1.  Use an underraise to build a pot.  Most of the time in poker, you should not try to “build a pot” but in rare instances such as having the nuts on the river, you can underraise to squeeze a little more out of a pot where players would fold to a real bet.

2.  Pay attention to other underraisers.  They are probably trying to build a pot.  If they are sufficiently unsophisticated that they don’t even know about the underraise rule, then it is safe to assume that they will not know to protect their hand with a big bet (pre-river).  Thus, an underraise is a good sign that he holds something very good.  You should probably still call, as you are getting pot odds, but now you know you probably need a straight or better to beat him.

3.  If there is a 3-bet max, and the stacks are big compared to the bets, an underraise by you can help to limit how much a round will cost you.  This is an excellent passive-aggressive move to help to draw out cheaply.

*  note that in Aberdeen Scotland, you can’t underraise, even to go all-in! Thus, the savvy player in early position that is nervous about his hand, should come out and bet 51% of the amount in his opponent’s stack, making it impossible for the opponent to come back at him.