Regarding JG’s post on backdoor covers…

We had NU+10.5 in this game.  Think about that when you watch this.

Yes, you saw that. An easy cover, then an interception returned for a touchdown to blow it…..except that the students stormed the field and tore down the goal posts, which meant KSU was unable to kick the PAT. I wonder to this day if any of the fans on the goal post bet on NU that day.

They’ve played down to 3 tables in the $50k HORSE event.  Today, we’ll have

(Table 58)
Erik Sagstrom – 1,315,000
Erik Seidel – 464,000
Steve Billirakis – 576,000
David Chiu – 397,000
Mike Wattel – 779,000
Chau Giang – 616,000

(Table 60)
Huck Seed – 672,000
Ray Dehkharghani – 262,000
Brett Richey – 671,000
Todd Brunson – 145,000
Vitaly Lunkin – 1,527,000
Frank Kassela – 499,000

(Table 62)
Tony G – 642,000
David Bach – 1,265,000
John Hanson – 815,000
Ville Wahlbeck – 842,000
John Kabbaj – 678,000
Freddy Deeb – 1,300,000
Gus Hansen – 801,000

This event will be one of the few to be aired on ESPN. You know that they so want Gus Hansen to make the final table. Whoever does make it, it will be a Murderer’s Row.

The Main Event, now lasting 13 days, begins on Friday. As with last year, they will take a break until November before playing the Final Table. Let’s do some Fantasy Poker again. Draft your poker players aby leaving comments to this post. Pick 3. You can’t pick anybody that is already picked. You get 1 point if your player goes to Day 2, 2 points if they make it to Day 3, and so on. I’ll take:
-Ivey
-Hellmuth
-Lisandro

Yesterday I watched the last 25 minutes of regulation time of the Spain-South Africa match and the last 70 minutes of the US-Brazil match. I watched for those odd amounts of time because I just happened onto the games as I was flipping channels. I enjoyed both games immensely, as I got to see 4 goals in the first game (I had something else to do during the overtime) and 4 goals in the second game (the US was already up 1-0 when I turned on the game).

I played soccer for three years in high school, so I appreciate and understand the game. I can watch a 0-0 tie and not be bored. Despite all that, watching soccer still does not excite my neurons enough for me to become an avid fan of the sport.

What I get tired of, and the point of my post, is avid soccer fans who rag on the United States for being too dumb to not get the great sport of soccer the way the rest of the world does. I think the average American sports fan has been brought up with sports that have more scoring than soccer and thus the American sports fan craves more scoring. That doesn’t make them wrong, it just makes them different. Baseball management understands this. After the strike in 1994, everything that management in Baseball has done has increased the potential for more Home Runs and more scoring. New Ball Parks? Most have been very hitter friendly. Steroids? Ignore them until you have to deal with them. Juiced balls? There have definitely been several years where it was apparant that baseball had doctored the baseballs to fly further. Based on Revenues and attendence figures over the last decade or so, the owners plan has worked. Americans have followed baseball in record numbers as Home Run totals and scoring has climbed.

I am not saying that baseball was right for doing that and I am not saying that soccer should change its rules to encourage more scoring. What I am saying is that if Soccer never catches on here as a big spectator/TV sport in the United States, the US fans are not dummies because of that. They just prefer more scoring in their sports.

I read Outliers by Malcom Gladwell this weekend.  If you liked Freakonomics and MoneyBall, you’ll love Outliers.

The book is a summary of the results of a statistical investigation into the causes of success.  Not surprisingly, it turns out that what we conventionally attribute to success is not what truly leads to success.  All sorts of odd things like you birth date, your ancestry, and darn luck are more highly correlated with success than things such as IQ or hard work.  As a person with a high IQ that is a hard worker, I find that disappointing.

There are many fascinating anecdotes in the book, but my favorite one was the contrast between Christopher Langan and Robert Oppenheimer.  Both men had/have very high IQs. (Langan’s is higher.  In fact, it is the highest in America).  Langan spent most of his life as a bouncer and is now a farmer.  Oppenheimer led the Manhatten Project.  Why did these two men go such different directions?  According to Gladwell, it all came down to their ability (or lack thereof) to communicate effectively.

To illustrate the point, he tells the story of Oppenheimer trying to poison his college professor.  Read that again.  He tried to poison his professor.  I did some crazy shit in college, but I never once considered poisoning my professor.  Oppenheimer, who must have had some seriously good bull, managed to talk his punishment down to probation…for attempted murder.

Langan, while in college, lost the transmission in his car.  He could catch a ride from somebody else, but doing so would only get him to campus in the afternoon.  So he requested something simple: to be allowed to switch his classes from the morning to the afternoon.  His request was denied.  Do you realize what a simple request this was?  “Excuse me, I have the highest IQ in America, and one day this university will be able to boast of their association with me, but only if you let me switch my classes.”  God only knows how he approached asking, but he was ineffective.

These two events led to a chain of events that put one genius at the Manhatten Project and another as a bouncer.

The point is that IQ, once above a certain score, does not have a meaningful, positive correlation with success.  The ability to effectively communicate does.  The book attributes the ability to effectively communicate to all sorts of cultural influences, but regardless the cause, the ability to effectively communicate is absolutely critical to success.  I see it at work every day.

I have a lot of stories that share the following basic fact pattern:
1)  I was right.
2)  I didn’t get what I deserved (or, worse, I received punishment I didn’t deserve.)

One such story is the one you are probably bored of hearing me tell.  It involves being forced by a tournament director to accept a 4-way split of a tournament pot.  With the amount of chips I had, I would have easily won first (50%) or maybe second (30%), so taking 25% was a pay cut.  The pot was very large, so this was a significant punishment.  Why was I punished?  For starters, I acted like an asshole, which drew the ire of others.  Next, I chose not to argue my point.  My opponent was busy making his case to the tournament director while I sat there, smug, telling myself “I know I didn’t break any rules, and therefore, after enough deliberation, the right side will win.”  And I was right about one thing: I didn’t break any rules.  Guess what?  Being right rarely matters one fucking bit.  Had I acted in a way that pleased the tournament director, had I engaged the other player in discussion rather than allow him to run off to the tournament director, had I tried to explain my position, I could have prevailed.  In short, how I interacted with others had a greater impact on my success than being right did.

People who interact effectively with others are more successful than those who do not.  This concept is the premise of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  We have gatekeepers at every turn in life.  All sorts of people stand in the way of us and what we want.  If you can bend them to your will, you can achieve what you want.

Remember that scene in Star Wars when Obi-Wan introduced us to the Jedi Mind Trick (”…these aren’t the droids you are looking for…”)?  Didn’t you think that was just so cool?  What a helpful trick, to be able to persuade others to do your bidding!  I know guys that have the IQ of a donkey but can sell a freezer to an Eskimo.  They do quite well.

There is an application of this lesson to poker.  The Fundamental Theorem of Poker states that

Every time you play a hand differently from the way you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; and every time you play your hand the same way you would have played it if you could see all their cards, they lose. Conversely, every time opponents play their hands differently from the way they would have if they could see all your cards, you gain; and every time they play their hands the same way they would have played if they could see all your cards, you lose.

That pretty well cuts to the chase in poker.  But I think we can cut ever more to the chase.  Why is it that you want to know what your opponent holds?  You won’t get a quiz, and you don’t get a cookie for knowing what he holds.  The answer is in the theorem: it is because this information should affect your action.  That still fall short, in my opinion, of what really matters.  I don’t think it is really your action that matters, but the response of your opponent to your action.  Say you can see his cards, and you see you are way ahead.  So you bet.  That’s neat.  What really, really matters is that he calls.  Ditto if you are behind.  You decide your only chance to win is to bluff.  So you do.  That’s neat.  The only thing that matters is that he folds.  If he calls, then your action seems pretty foolish.

When you can get people to do what you want them to do – in poker an in life – you can accomplish just about anything.  In poker, it is all about reading people.  I don’t think that the goal to reading people is to figure out what they are holding, although that is certainly important.  The most important read to get on people is to be able to anticipate how various actions will generate various responses.  You can coerce your opponent into folding, calling or raising through a combination of your betting actions, your image, your body language and what you say.

Dan Harrington wrote about the “Metagame”, and Doyle Brunson and Mike Caro also dedicated pages of their books on table image.  Their focus is on image, but I think there is more to it than that.  It isn’t about trying to get people to put you in one of four categories, hoping that this will cause them to make a bad decision.  That’s too passive.  I think the main goal in poker is to know your opponent intimately and to think through what sorts of situations are highly likely to produce specific responses from them.  If those responses are to your favor, then you can wait for the situation to present itself, or better, you can create the situation.

I told the story last week of me bluffing an opponent, Dufus, out of a hand.  It became obvious to me that he was absolutely unwilling to risk all of chips with something short of the nuts.  So, when a scare card came on the turn, I went all in.  I forced him to do what I wanted, which was to fold.

Mark Junell is a brilliant person and great poker player.  I have a tendency to play pretty loose/aggressive early in a session, and Mark knows this.  After I build a huge stack (either from winning or re-buying), I tend to sit on it.  I’ll make some speculative calls, but I become a player much like Dufus.  I’m not going to risk my whole stack on middling hands like I will earlier in the night.  I suspect Mark Junell knows this.

He made a really crazy bluff at me while I was sitting on a big stack.  It was obvious that I had a very good hand.  The board showed the flush, and it had already paired.  Undeterred, Mark made a big bet and got me to fold.  He knew (I think) that it wasn’t that bet that scared me.  It was the bet that he was going to make on the river that scared me.  Through a combination of table image (i.e., that he has a reputation for firing bullets on every street) and action, he made me succumb to his will.

That’s two stories about getting folds, but the same holds true for getting calls when you want them.  Those stories just aren’t as exciting.

I don’t think these concepts are novel, but I don’t think players sufficiently focus on them.  What do you think about in between hands?  Are you reminding yourself of your starting hand requirements?  Are you coming up with a loss limit?  Are you planning a table image?  I hope not.  I think that the best use of your time and brain power is to think about how each player will likely respond in a given situation and, if that response is what you want, to think about what in turn you need to do to be sure that you get into that situation.  Once players do what you want them to do, you will be successful.

Spain won the European championship last year. This was incredibly unusual for Spain as they have one of the top three top-flight leages in the world and usually coast through the opening rounds of international  but then trip and lose ugly when it really starts to count. They are the international soccer’s version of the Astros, or maybe the 1998 Vikings.

(for the sake of my friend and sometime drinking companion CKA, I’ll avoid the obvious analogy…LOL)

Today they fell back to form.

As this wasn’t the actual World Cup, most Americans aren’t even aware, much less care, but this is one of the biggest wins for the Americans in their international soccer history.