One thing Colin Cowherd and I have in common is our love of lists.  This morning he was saying he watched the Top 25 Worst Heavy Metal Ballads on VH1.  Oh, how I can relate.

So I found a list of the most hated people in college football.  I don’t agree entirely with the list, but I respect the source. The list is two years old - hardly newsworthy, but certainly IAGworthy - but I suspect it wouldn’t be much different if published today.

In particular, I was suprised to see Jim Tressel on there.  If you actually read the rationale, it reads like a reason to like him, so I am totally baffled!  He’s a good guy who runs a clean program and has success.  His team is easily top 5 in success in his tenure by any measure, and he’s more likeable than most of the other coaches in that club.

If the list had been made by a Pac-10 fan, it would have included Mack Brown.  Beating USC and “lobbbying” to pass Cal in the polls to play in the BCS seems to have had a lasting impact out west.  If the list were updated, I am sure Petrino would make the list and possibly Saban and for similar reasons.  My list would include Trev Alberts (aka Superfag) and Kellen Heard.

The premise

Many years ago (say, pre-Moneymaker Era), there was not a significant amount of poker strategy resources – at least, not compared to the amount available today. Today, poker strategy books are printed too quickly for anybody to read them all. Online articles on strategy are a dime a dozen. You can even learn strategy by listening to Gabe Kaplan’s play-by-play on GSN’s High Stakes Poker. Not only are more resources available, by all appearances, the average player is taking greater advantage of such resources.

Yet, despite the overall improvement in Poker I.Q, I don’t think that the better-than-average poker player is experiencing a notable improvement in his earnings.

One reason is that, of course, his relative advantage is shrinking (or, at best, not growing) as his opponents are becoming all the wiser. It is the basic arms-race dilemma where your efforts to improve your advantage are offset by your opponents’ similar efforts. In short, everybody is reading the same books.

In the same vein, I think all players’ convergence toward the same optimal strategy changes what the optimal strategy should be. To illustrate this, imagine that a large number of players in Rock, Paper Scissors always picked Rock. If you were to write a book on optimal strategy, you would correctly advise people to pick Paper. This strategy would work for a while until all players began picking Paper. Advantage neutralized. What is required is an updated optimal strategy now (i.e., pick Scissors). And just as Scissors would have been a terrible strategy back in the day that everyone picked Rock, I believe that the appropriate strategy now would have been unprofitable back when poker players were not as enlightened as they are now.

The current paradigm
Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science, noted that “a scientific paradigm topples only when the last of its powerful adherents dies” I don’t expect the youngest of the post-Moneymaker boom poker enthusiasts (or their shared poker paradigm) to die any time soon, so I think the Scissors Strategy I’d like to suggest will be a good strategy for a long time.

To figure out how to foil what everyone else is doing, I think we should first inventory what exactly they are doing. I am less interested in inventorying the actual advice in poker books. Rather, it is the manner in which such advice seems to be applied in which I am interested. In my experience, most current poker players’ paradigm for decision-making follows the following rules:
1) Disciplined pre-flop selection;
2) Bet/raise when you think you are ahead;
3) Only call on a draw when getting pot/implied odds;
4) Make continuation bets on the flop when you take the lead pre-flop; and
5) Don’t call off all/most of your chips on a hunch that your opponent is on the steal.

The paradigm shift
How do we foil a strategy that follows these rules?

For starters, you should assume that your opponent is playing with good pre-flop cards and very good cards if they raise. There isn’t a lot of downside to folding when this assumption is wrong, but there is a real savings achieved by folding when you are right.

Of course, your opponents will, by and large, expect you to also be playing good pre-flop cards until proven otherwise. Prove them otherwise. And do so in the cheapest possible manner. If you are going to play connectors, make them suited, played from late position in a multi-way, unraised pot. Ditto with junk like QT and A7. Many players will chunk these hands in any situation (possibly in part because they do not trust themselves to be disciplined post-flop with these hands). If you show down such junk, players will notice that you play junk but will likely forget the context in which you just did it. In other words, it is cheap advertising. Once labeled as a loose donkey, money will begin to flow your way.

A lot of people will call with a big draw even when facing a pot-sized bet on the flop (interestingly, this is a trait that should have gone extinct in our age of poker enlightenment but, in my experience, has not). This is wrong for them to do if they can expect their opponent to pop it again on the turn. While you gain EV each time your opponent makes a mistake, their loose calls in this situation can add a lot of volatility to your results. If you think you are ahead and that your opponent is on a draw, you should make a bet of such magnitude to win the pot then and there. Even if EV is lost in this approach compared to the pot-sized bet (an assumption I am not certain is true), it should be more than compensated by the fact that your stack and bankroll are better protected to be around to do battle later (possibly in an even more EV-advantageous situation).

The frequency of continuation bets seemed to increase significantly shortly after Dan Harrington’s first book was printed. Make note of players that often make continuation bets. If your opponent makes a continuation bet on the flop, strongly consider calling even if you barely connected with the flop. Your opponent will miss the flop about 2/3 of the time, so it is reasonable to think you might be ahead. This is best done if you have something like middle pair with a flush draw. That way, even if you are wrong about your middle pair, you can still draw out on your opponent. And whether it’s that middle pair or the draw-out that wins it for you, you will win much more than the pot; you will win the coveted (i.e., profitable) moniker of “donkey”.

Finally, even players that are willing to dance a little bit will become risk-adverse when facing a very large (that is, either an all-in or pot-committing) bet. Thus, there is a lot of profit to be made with such a bet. Of course, it could be devastating to make such a big move and get called, so you really need to pick your spots to do this. I generally don’t like betting when a “scare card” comes, as it may well have helped your opponent. I also don’t like going all-in as much as simply making a pot-committing bet. Both have the same objective, but many people will read an all-in as a possible bluff but read something short of an all-in bet as representing a legitimate hand. If the pot is $200 and you and your opponent have $400 more in chips each, there is probably more money to be made (i.e., more fold equity) in betting $275 than in betting the $400. Your opponent will only call $275 with a very strong hand; some will call only with the nuts. Just exactly what circumstances do and do not warrant a bluff here would require significantly more analysis than what can fit in this article. That said, you should certainly only do this if your opponent has already shown a propensity to fold in this spot (as opposed to simply your speculation that they might in such a situation). Next, you need to have a pretty high level of confidence that their holdings do not warrant a call on their part. Bluffing with a big bet isn’t something I suggest you do often, but given the enormously high rate of return involved, even doing it infrequently can add quite a bit of EV to your game.

Parting advice
Each of these strategies to foil the new generation of poker players will fail against a poor poker player. Thus, you should still make a practice of labeling each opponent and tailoring your approach to each type. I do think that, given the proliferation of poker advice, there are more good players out there than bad. The fact that bad poker-playing habits have taken a toll on the bankrolls of bad players only compounds this trend. So, it isn’t a bad assumption – at least until proven otherwise – that your opponents are fairly good. I certainly think that is safer than assuming your opponents are bad until proven otherwise.

In summary, when you find your self against the new generation of poker players, you need a paradigm shift. Playing the same game as they do will just result in pushing money back and forth while the rake beats everybody. Step out and try something different, and watch the chips start to flow in your direction.

Because it is almost football season and because everyone has an opinion on T.O., I thought it would be good to have another perspective:

Hitler is a Buffalo Fan

It just occurred to me: with twitter coming into existance since the last football season, will this form of additional information have an affect on football betting? Since you have so many football players twittering, you have access to what they are thinking, and inevitably to some information that they have regarding injuries, frustrations with teammates, and feelings about upcoming games and opponents. If someone follows the tweets of the right players, they may be able to ascertain inside information that they may not have had access to before. How will the betting lines respond to this? How will the NFL or the NCAA respond to this?

It should be interesting to see how much twitter might or might not affect things. Any insights appreciated.

I know this isn’t supposed to be a political blog, but this seemed relevant to IAG… and also to WTF?

Under House Bill 1495, no longer will gamblers be able to offset their winnings with their losses for Hawai’i state income tax purposes. Previously gamblers would be taxed only on their net winnings, but now they will be taxed on gross winnings.

A Hawai’i resident who wins $10,000 in a year, for example, and loses $9,000 in the same year used to be taxed only on the $1,000 in net winnings. Under the new law, that resident would be taxed on the full $10,000 in winnings.

Even if you end up a net loser, you will still be taxed on whatever you won along the way.

Dennis Kohara, a certified public accountant in Honolulu, called the law “ridiculous.”

“You sit down at the blackjack table. You win a hand. You lose the next one. You win another hand. You lose the next one,” he said.

And, under the new law, you now owe taxes on all the winning hands, which are not offset by any of the losing hands, Kohara said.

State Rep. Pono Chong, who sponsored the legislation, acknowledged that Kohara is correct.

However, Chong said, the new law will mainly affect those who have substantial winnings, along with substantial losses…

The Department of Taxation, which supported the bill, has said it’s unclear how much the law will actually bring in to the state. However, if it is assumed the gambling losses remain at the $5 million level currently claimed, the revenue gain could be $300,000 a year, the department said in testimony in support of the measure.

The new law is retroactive to January of this year.

When I first read this, my impression was more humorous than serious – how is the state of Hawaii going to enforce something as silly as taxing gross winnings? When gambling – whether legal or illegal – generally is an activity that occurs beyond the reach of tax authorities and, for most taxpayers, is something that only comes onto a tax return voluntarily, if at all?

Well, if I’m following this correctly, there are two ways you could get hit by the tax:

1.) You’re so honest that you  already report all of your net gambling activity to the state and pay taxes on the net winnings because you’re that kind of guy. If you are doing this now, then you’re a moron and probably wouldn’t even notice the marginal increase in your tax bill under this bill.

2.) You’re a high enough roller – or a lucky enough normal person, say from a slot jackpot – that your payoff from the casino is large enough to require a 1099 to be issued. In that case, the Feds and the state already know about your payoff and are going to tax you on the whole amount so it only makes sense under the existing system (and the old Hawaii system) to also declare your losses and minimize that tax liability as much as you can, except now the state of Hawaii is saying that you can’t deduct the losses anymore. This is  the scenario that Rep. Chong is talking about when he says it will only affect a small subset of taxpayers, because only a small subset of gamblers ever receive 1099’s from the casino.

So, let’s just ignore the morons in #1, as they’re hopeless, and focus on the people in #2, the high rollers. Well, the tax is going to disproportionately going to hurt them, because this law isn’t so much a tax on their big “winnings” as it is a service charge on their bankroll.

(Think about it intuitively: high rollers are not necessarily winners. More often than not they’re usually big losers, who, when they do win, win big. So in the context of this article, most of the people who are being referred to as “winners” based on getting big 1099-required payouts from the casino probably aren’t really winners, either – they’re just high rollers who have thrown a lot of money around and are now getting back towards even, if at all.)

So what’s a high-roller to do? Certainly he’s going to avoid situations where his bankroll gets siphoned away everytime he hits a winner, and he’ll do it in a couple of different ways: 1.) He could quit being a high-roller and just play at a level below the reporting threshhold, but where’s the fun in that? or more likely, 2.) He’ll just go gamble on the same scale as before but he’ll go somewhere where his winngs aren’t reported, whether it’s an underground game or somewhere overseas.

Either way, the state of Hawaii misses out on ALL of his gambling income, including the stuff that’s actually income, and Vegas, and anywhere else Hawaiians like to go to gamble, lose out on his action and get hurt by the new law. if I were Las Vegas, I would be pissed, especially considering that all tax jurisdictions are huring for money these days and that this kind of idea tends to spread around the bureaucrat hive once it gets introduced.

That said, my gut feeling says that somewhere along the way this law will get challened in court and that there must be some tax law precedent that defines the difference between revenue and income, of which the “winnings” we’ve described in this article are definitely the former, and all of this will be moot. I hope.

Now back to dick jokes and football.

(h/t Boortz, btw)

http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/9839296/Erin-Andrews-nude-video-scandal:-Whose-fault?

I dunno about this one, but I do agree that when a white man (Barry Switzer) is caught with a gun AT AN AIRPORT, he is just true country.  When a black man like Vince Young has a legal, licensed hangun, he is a menace to society.