Poker-edge update.
Topic: Poker
As promised, I wrote to a couple of online card rooms about the passage in Pokerpages (see entry on 13th November) and also enquired about their attitude to Pokertracker. I attach the replies:

From Pokerstars:

PokerTracker is fine (and encouraged!). Software that assists you in "real time" or that makes use of automated decisions is generally prohibited, although we have no firm rules for what we disallow. Use your best judgement - if it seems like an unfair advantage, it most likely is. Please let me know if there's anything else I can help you with.


Corals (edited):

The reference is about "Pokerbots" I think, these are programs that play for you based on statistics. The rumour is that there is one on XXXXXXX that has been on for some time, but is such a high rake producer they were loath to do anything about it. However this is just a rumour. It is in the interest of the large sites to run as honest a game as possible, as the rake is there as long as the players are. I know from our dealings with Party that they use a lot of resources to track down collusion, "Bots" and Disconnection Protection abuse.

A lot of players now use Poker Tracker and other similar programs this is basically saving them time writing in a notebook which I know a lot of players do as well.

Neither of these answers the question directly as to whether the passage concerns Poker-edge or not. I now suspect that it doesn't and that it's really about something called 'Winholdem', but I guess we'll know soon. Meanwhile, I'm surprised how calm the sites are about Poker Tracker. I think that part of the skill of the game is making your own notes and observations and this service does a lot of that for you. I am interested to hear from anyone who has worked with it. Perhaps it's time I invested.

Poker on ESPN.
Topic: Poker
I watched a couple of this year's WSOP finals at the weekend. One was the NL hold'em event that James Vogl won, the other was a 7-card stud event. Both were interesting for different reasons.

From the perspective of card play, I found the 7-card one much more interesting. Being a limit event, there were hands being bet on all the 'streets', which made a nice change from the all-ins that you get in most NLHE events. I have often wondered what Ted Forrest looked like and how he played, having read about how big he plays in the Bellagio. I was very impressed by him. In one hand he calls his opponent all the way to the river with only a pair of twos and wins! That is an amazing read. He was a worthy winner.

James' NLHE victory was interesting because of James himself. He was very self-effacing. He admitted the large role that luck plays and didn't seem too excited. I loved the bit at the end when he refused to be photographed holding the cash in the air, saying 'I'm not going to do that. It's vulgar. I'm British!'.

Separately, I can't help remarking on the commentator, Norman Chad. I didn't like him at the beginning but by the end I was warming to him. He reminds me of Nick Diamond, the commentator on MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch. After a while I started looking forward to his inevitable references to failed marriages. Great stuff.

Comments enabled for now....
I have resisted having comments on my blog since I started it, because of some of the petty and often vulgar abuse that I've seen on sites like Gutshot and the Hendon Mob. However, I have lately found that I've been getting involved in many off-topic discussions on poker fora, as frankly I find them more interesting. This probably isn't fair on those who aren't interested, so as an experiment, I am going to introduce comments. I will of course stop them if I have to spend time removing abuse.

To get the ball rolling, I'm going to post something I wrote today about Israel/Palestine. It's a subject I intend to learn more about. I didn't always have an opinion about this and my current opinion isn't the one that I had about four years ago. Now read on....

Israel/Palestine

The topic of Israel/Palestine does fascinate me, yet I'm not Israeli, I'm not jewish and I think that judaism is a false religion, like ALL religions. But I can spot a country with courts, juries and elections and I can spot thugs who steal from their own people too.

I didn't use to have much of an opinion about the matter until a casual remark by a friend about four or five years ago. He said 'If Israel carries on like this, it'll be a temporary state'. I had no idea what he was talking about. He began to say something about a visit to a mosque in Jerusalem by an Israeli politician that had kicked off a hostile reaction from Palestinians. On my next visit to the local library, I found a book called 'Arabs and Israelis for Beginners' and took it out. It comes from a series of 'for Beginners' books, which take a cartoon based approach to issues, mostly from a left-wing angle. I trusted it to give me a grounding. Reading it left me feeling that the creation of Israel had been highly unfair and that the country's behaviour was provocative to innocent Palestinian people. It made me quite angry actually.

Then after Sept 11th, I started reading a blog that was mentioned in the Mirror (irony here!) and was blown away by the quality of the writing. It was Norwegian and I loved it. It also listed other sites and I was amazed that there was so much good writing out there that could be accessed for free. From them I learned the counterarguments and learned some facts that I didn't know before - stuff that almost never gets mentioned in the Independent and the Guardian.

More and more, I've come around to the Israeli point of view. I do want peace and prosperity for the Palestinian people as much as I want security for Israel. But the best start for that to happen is for outsiders to stop indulging the Palestinians in their tendancy to blame all their woes on the west and on Israel. In 2002, I went to Vegas and found myself sitting next to an American of Pakistani extraction in the Bellagio. I asked him about Pakistan and he said something I'll never forget: "We need secular government and we need to stop blaming everything on the rest of the world. Every time I phone my parents back home they rant on about the CIA, Israel, the jews and so on." Palestine is the same. While I think it would be best for Israel to leave the territories in the West Bank, some honest speaking would help too. Like this from Donald Rumsfeld: "My feeling about the so-called occupied territories, is that there was a war, Israel urged neighbouring countries not to get involved in it once it started, they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict." That is the kind of plain speaking truth that should be said more often, instead of the pandering that most journalists do.

Topic: Poker
The latest monthly newsletter from Pokerpages contains an interesting post:

Welcome news as major poker sites have begun scanning for, and suspending the accounts, of players who are using a certain 3rd party software add-on to gain an unfair advantage over their opponents. The current crackdown focuses on one particular program that even claims to automatically play the users hands based on an analysis of over 500000 outcomes, even going so far as to automatically bet, check and so on with the player having to take no part whatsoever. This news only came to light as this issue of the magazine was being completed, so expect a fuller story in the next issue. For now, suffice it to say that the poker sites are doing all that they can to protect us, the honest player, and to ensure that we all get a fair game."

I had no idea what this was referring to, until a friend asked me whether I had looked at www.poker-edge.com. The site claims to offer a service that "gives you access to a database of PartyPoker player statistics.... These stats break down your opponent's Pre-Flop, Flop, Turn and River play into numbers that tell a story about his or her poker game."

Is this the same thing? I intend to find out this week.

A great new poker blog.
I heartily recommend a new poker blog that's been put together by an anonymous writer called 'the poker bastard'. It's clearly aimed at dishing dirt in the poker world. It looks like the writer is based in the south of England, as it's full of references to Gutshot and Luton. I hope that he's able to extend his remit to other parts of the UK.

Checkout www.pokerbastard.blogspot.com

I have felt uncomfortable a few times that I didn't have the nerve to expose some of the things I don't like about the way that the game is run or the way that certain players behave. Now a weight is lifted from my shoulders. Such naming and shaming only works however if the writer is accurate in his reports. It's therefore encouraging to see in his latest post that he's seeking verification of a story about drug use among poker players. I hope he keeps his verification standards up. A few false reports would spoil an otherwise useful service.

While I've been vilified several times by anonymous writers on poker forums, I've never been able to agree with those who think that people should not be able to post anonymously. Sometimes there are things that should be said to warn the unwary, which cannot be said from a named individual. The Hendon Mob's forum grew its traffic enormously after someone calling himself 'The Executioner' wrote an expose of the AcesPoker fiasco. The post was so good that I printed it onto paper as soon as I saw it, certain that it would be deleted (it was). Anonymity has its place provided it's not abused.

Rejoice rejoice!
I'm very relieved to see that George W. Bush has been re-elected to the White House. It's a vote of confidence for his "forward strategy of freedom". Americans have sensed that bringing freedom to the rest of the world, in particular the Middle East, is the best form of defence. Kerry could never explain how his consensus-based multilateralism and readiness to withdraw from tough fights at the first sign of trouble was any different to the policies of the past that lead to 9-11.

That's because there was no difference.

Why I want Bush to win.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

I want an 'unreasonable' president. We face an ideological enemy and need an ideological strategy to combat it. Bush grasps this. Kerry doesn't. Soon after the atrocities of September 11th 2001, Bush revealed his intention to take the battle to the terrorists. It would involve far more than merely reacting to events. Instead he would aim at nothing less than the transformation of the Middle-East through regime change. He was right.

It is rare in war that your enemy tells you the path you should take in order to defeat it, but such was the hubris of Al Qaeda until recently, that it did exactly that with the 2003 publication of a book titled 'The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsular after the Fall of Baghdad', written by Al Qaeda member Yussuf al-Ayyeri and published by The Centre for Islamic Research and Studies, a company established by bin Laden in 1995.

See this review: http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=4153

In the book, Al-Ayyeri explains Al Qaeda's theory of history as the battle of belief versus unbelief. Belief in Islam has, according to the book, been challenged by many opposing philosophies over the centuries and all except one have been defeated. These have been modernism, nationalism, socialism and Ba'athism. The removal of Ba'athism has created what he calls a "clean battlefield" for the final and greatest battle of them all, against "secularist democracy". Al Ayyeri describes it as "far more dangerous to Islam" than all its predecessors combined, because of democracy's "seductive capacities", which persuade people that they can be empowered to control their own destinies, leading them to draft their own laws and abandon Sharia, the strict Islamic law handed down in the Koran. The book says that democracy will, "make Muslims love this world, forget the next world, and abandon Jihad".

That is why they are so desperate to prevent elections, order and prosperity for ordinary Arab people. It is also why I want Bush to win. Only Bush's "forward strategy of freedom" will solve our long term terror problem. And we know this because our enemy has told us.

Al Qaeda's declining ambitions.
I've said for about three years that Osama bin Laden is dead, so on Friday it was somewhat of a surprise to hear that he had released a videotape mentioning presidential candidate John Kerry. I've since wondered whether a look-a-like was used to make the video and whether old voice recordings could have been used for the sound. But whatever the case, I'm sure that it comes from Al Qaeda and that's what matters most.

I find this latest message very interesting and believe it shows that Al Qaeda is being beaten into submission. That's not something that comes over from reports of the atrocities it commits in Iraq, but an examination of the tone and content of the tape bears this out. To demonstrate this, I will compare the recent message with previous ones both alleged to have come from him.

In bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war against the United States,

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1996.html

he speaks of Arab youth being willing to sacrifice themselves to kill Americans: "Those youths know that the reward in fighting you, the USA, is double than the reward in fighting someone not from the People of the Book. They have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you. An infidel, an enemy of God like you, cannot be in the same heaven with his righteous executioner."

and later says of his fanatics:

"Those youth are different from your soldiers. Your problem will be how to convince your troops to fight, while our problem will be how to restrain our youth to wait for their turn in fighting and in operations. These youths are commendable and praiseworthy."

The clear assumption was that Americans wouldn't fight back against Al Qaeda aggression. That was understandable, given the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, the withdrawal from Beirut after the Marine Barracks bombing of 1982 and the withdrawal from Somalia after a small number of US soldiers were killed on a humanitarian mission and one dead American pilot was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

Of this, bin Laden comments:

"You had been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew; the extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the heart of every Muslim and a remedy to the chests of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut, Aden, and Mogadishu.

Over six years later, in November 2002, another letter appeared from bin Laden, addressed to the American people:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,845725,00.html

In it he answers two questions:

Q1) Why are we fighting and opposing you?
Q2) What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

The answer to question 1 is the predictable list of grievances. But in answering question 2, he goes further in telling Americans how to live their lives. The list is long, so I shall only include highlights:

"The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam .. The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you .. We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest ..

You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator.

You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich ..

If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation."

And now it's 2004 and bin Laden appears just before the US election and his message is rather more muted than before. He says:

"Do not play with our security, and spontaneously you will secure yourself."

What?

That's it? "Leave us alone and we'll leave you alone"? What happened the youths who "have no intention except to enter paradise by killing you."

What happened to your threats of further harm if we didn't end gambling and homosexuality? Why the loss of confidence?

There are a few clues. As this new story reports:

'U.S. officials told NBC News that in parts of the tape not aired by Al-Jazeera, bin Laden acknowledges that the recent Afghan elections were not a success for him because "they came off with minimal violence." And he admits that "aggressive Pakistani operations" in South Waziristan, where he is believed to be hiding, have hurt his operations.'

I'm not an expert in military affairs, but I'd wager that Al Qaeda knows that it's losing. It has failed to take back Afghanistan, where Anthony Loyd in the Times of September 13th reports:

`in Afghanistan, the insurgency is failing and failing badly .. it is the Taleban and their Al Qaeda comrades who find themselves isolated and pressured. In a country awash with weapons and populated by a skilled guerrilla force, the insurgents have failed to ignite resistance to the 18,000 American troops there'.

Al Qaeda supporters are now holed up in Fallujah, where the US Army is about to mount a concerted assault. Their future looks bleak unless they can cut off the army's supply lines and the way to do that is to change the Commander-in-Chief. Rashly they issue this latest broadcast, hoping that Americans will opt for the easy life and select Kerry. It's their only chance.

Al Qaeda's own words reveal that we are poised to win against them if we hold firm. Tomorrow, I will show what Al Qaeda has to say about the situation in Iraq and why their own words reveal the correctness of Bush's approach to the Middle East.

The Inarticulate Competent.
My recent piece about the New York Times has provoked some amusing responses. Andy Ward wrote to tell me that it smacked of paranoia. I should stress that while I did want to make the point that Bush is more intelligent than his critics make out, I don't really suppose that the NYT actually planned to leak this revelation as part of a smear. That was 'tongue-in-cheek'.

The reason that Bush is considered an idiot by so many is that he's a terrible speaker and he especially doesn't seem to speak well to large non-friendly crowds. While this doesn't inspire confidence, it doesn't per se mean that he's not an effective leader or decision maker. A president is a commander-in-chief not a debating champion. It is widely said that Kerry won the first debate. I didn't see it, but I heard that Bush repeated himself many times and looked rather worn, while Kerry spoke better and looked more assured. I suppose I should have seen that coming, given that Kerry is a Senator, which almost by definition means that he's more of a talker than a doer. Bush was a governor, where the virtually the opposite applies.

All of this reminds me of something I read many years ago in a review of a book about business. The author listed various types of people not to hire. One of these was 'the articulate incompetent'. I agree that such people exist. But if they do, then it's likely that there are others who are 'inarticulate competents', people whose understanding is superior to their ability to express it. I've met many poker players with a great intuitive understanding of the game who could not express how they arrived at their decisions, as well as educated professionals from business, academia and medicine who played appalling and justified losing plays with eloquent nonsense, which they sincerely believed. I know whom I would rather back in a game.

About the Gambling Bill.
There has been much humbug this week about the proposed Gambling Bill from people who really ought to know better. According to some, the arrival of bigger casinos will bring Britain crime, prostitution, addiction, divorce, the death of the first-born in Blackpool (if the Daily Mail is to be believed) and worst of all, American businessmen. I am not so concerned. It's rare that I find myself in agreement with Tony Blair on domestic matters, but this week he pointed out that casino gambling is only a small part of overall gambling activity in this country and went on to say 'It's very important that we modernise the regulation of gambling for today's world... [W]hether we like it or not, we have gambling in this country, but with a series of rules and restrictions which are completely out of date.... Ninety per cent of the gambling bill is about better regulation and protection for children, removing slot machines from about 6,000 premises where minors, children, might have access to them."

That's seems very reasonable to me.

However, there is one thing that I do think is outrageous about certain forms of gambling in this country and it's the artificially generated near-miss. When the reels spin on a slot machine and bring you two watermelons, don't start thinking that the probablity of getting the third one is determined by dividing the the number of spaces on the reel by the number of watermelons. It isn't. And when the lemon comes in, with a watermelon directly about it, don't think you've had a 'near-miss'. You haven't. The machine is programmed to give you the sensation that you nearly got there. I think that this is disgusting.

It's not just done on slot machines either. Last week, for the first time in well over a year, I bought a scratchcard at a newsagent. The game on this card was based on a noughts-and-crosses grid. You had to scratch nine squares and if you found three nines in a row, you would win #9,999. Wouldn't you just know it, but there were four nines in one corner of the grid on my card? Anyone who started scratching it from the bottom left (I didn't), would get the idea that he was drawing to the jackpot in three directions. This was not a near-miss either. The printers of these cards are permitted to generate a certain amount of near-misses above the number that would occur naturally in a genuinely random distribution. This does offend me. By all means, people should be allowed to gamble in this country, but let's have more transparency. The odds should be what they appear to be. Making people think they were 'close' to a jackpot to entice them to play longer should be banned.

What is "Moderate Islam"?
A critic of my Iraq war views once told me in the Vic that a failing of Bush's post-9/11 strategy was that he had alienated "Moderate Islam". I don't recall what, if anything, I said in response, but I do remember wondering afterwards what the definition of moderate Islam is. Is there one? In theory, there shouldn't be much variation in Islamic thinking, because it's a revealed religion whose holy book is said to have been dictated by god to his last prophet on Earth. However, differences do exist in practice.

I often buy things from a shop across the road from my house. One of the men who works behind the counter is from Yemen and we get on rather well. Every time I go there, he says 'David, what's happening in the world today?' and invites me to launch into long discussions about current affairs. It will surprise you to know that I mostly decine to say much, but quite often when I do, we find things on which we can agree. Recently he asked me 'Why are these people kidnapping and killing in Iraq? It's completely senseless!'.

I replied 'It's not senseless to them. It's completely logical once you accept their belief that they are following what god wants them to do'.

He said 'But they aren't. I'm a muslim. I know it's wrong'.

I said 'They believe it's their obligation under "jihad".

He said 'No, no, no that's wrong. "Jihad" is a personal struggle, like when you want to stop smoking.'

'Well tell them that, not me!' I said.

Was this just a pointless discussion between two people separated by age, belief, race and upbringing? Possibly. But as a starting point for a definition of 'Moderate Islam', it works for me. I can have no quarrel with someone who sees "Jihad" as a personal affair. Those who think they are obliged to commence a holy war deserve a different fate.

The New York Times make a damaging attack on President Bush.
It's no secret that the New York Times is a left-leaning newspaper that wants Kerry to win in next week's election. During the 2000 election campaign, Bush was caught by a microphone in an unguarded moment pointing out an NYT reporter to Dick Cheney and describing him as a 'Major League Asshole'. So it doesn't surprise me that the paper seeks revenge this time around and deals out a dirty trick - straight from the bottom of the deck. Knowing that there is little time for him to react, they report incontrovertible evidence that Bush has a higher IQ than John Kerry.

Click here to see the full story. (May require registration).

Mr. Bush's score on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test at age 22 again suggests that his I.Q was the mid-120's, putting Mr. Bush in about the 95th percentile of the population, according to Mr. Sailer. Mr. Kerry's I.Q. was about 120, in the 91st percentile, according to Mr. Sailer's extrapolation of his score at age 22 on the Navy Officer Qualification Test.

This is damaging. Bush goes to great lengths to conceal his intelligence in public. He knows how damaging it can be electorally to be perceived as 'clever'. He's only ever lost one election in his life - a 1978 Congressional race in northern Texas. On that occasion, his opponent's campaign made this radio broadcast:

"In 1961, when Kent Hance graduated from Dimmitt High School in the 19th congressional district, his opponent George W. Bush was attending Andover Academy in Massachusetts. In 1965, when Kent Hance graduated from Texas Tech, his opponent was at Yale University. And while Kent Hance graduated from University of Texas Law School, his opponent -- get this, folks -- was attending Harvard."

Bush lost. He had been outdumbed. But he did at least learn the lesson and plays the simpleton at every opportunity. In subsequent elections this has always been the winning strategy. The moment you are perceived as being too smart in American politics, you are dead meat. Ronald Reagan was always portrayed as an ignoramus and won two presidential elections. Arnold Schwarzenegger was derided as a fool and comfortably won the Governorship of California. In the 2000 election, Bush outdumbed Gore and won (Gore does have a higher IQ than Bush, as proved by the same sources that place Bush over Kerry).

It's a testament to Bush's campaigning strengths that he's allowed Kerry to come over as the clever one. As the NYT article explains:

Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.

As a Bush fan, I just hope that the revelations have come out too late to harm him. I recall that a similar dirty trick was attempted just before the 2000 election, when it was reported that he'd had a drunk driving conviction. That didn't work because it was no secret that he'd been an alcoholic. You don't make great gains attacking your opponent's weaknesses. The key is attacking his strengths, as the Swift Boat Veterans have done so admirably by taking apart Kerry's Vietnam record. The NYT now wants to do the same thing. I must cross my fingers and hope it fails.

Focus.
Over at the Hendon Mob forum there's been a lot of talk about `focus' in poker. Naturally it is considered to be a `good thing'. I don't know why it is necessary to state this, as it's obviously true. However, I want to express a dissenting view. Firstly, all the focus in the world can't help you if you have a fundamentally unsound understanding of the game. Imagine a `focused' roulette player. He can concentrate as hard as he likes, but he's not going to win, because he's in a negative EV game.

Not only that, but I do believe that trying too hard to focus can be counter-productive. That might be personal to me, but I don't think it is. I remember that when I played chess for Midland Bank, I used to keep records of the games I played in the inter-bank league. As well as recording the actual moves, I noted the time on the clock at the point at which I played each move, thus allowing me to see how long I had taken over it. On reviewing my games, I would find almost without exception that the worst move I had played in every game was the one I had thought longest about.

This has applications to poker. When some people start to go into deep thinking mode, what they are actually doing is fighting their initial instinct. That's because their instinct is telling them to do something that is emotionally unappealing: in many cases, folding a strong, but not outstanding hand. In this situation, they start reviewing the betting trying to find some circumstances that would justify calling. So often I see people dwell up for long periods and then make terrible calls.

You will rarely see me do that. I act pretty quickly and chatter away if the conversation is interesting. I positively don't want the game to go quiet, in case I hear the siren voices calling me onto the rocks. If this happens to you, consider talking more and acting quicker. If you are going to be any good at this game, you need to have decent first instincts and if you can't trust them to guide you most of the time, you should consider quitting.

Advice on hands.
Over at the Gutshot website, co-proprietor Barry 'the bully' Martin offers advice on hands to those who ask for it, in a section of the site called 'Beat the Bully' ("Got a Scenario for the Bully? Unsure whether your play was right in the comp last night? You got a question? Put it to the Bully!"). As of today, there are 17 entries in the archives and all of them relate to situations in tournaments or satellites. For sure, the come-on text I quote above does mention comps, but it doesn't limit itself to them. Does nobody have any curiosity about cash play?

I find this rather frustrating, as to me it exemplifies the 'poker=tournaments' mentality that plagues this country and has held back the game's growth for so long. It ought to surprise me that nobody has asked a question regarding a hand in a cash game, but alas it doesn't. I've checked all 17 questions to prove that they are all tournament related, but I knew that they would be before I even looked at the first one. Why? Well it's because in all the years that I've looked at the advice being requested on the Hendon Mob, I've rarely seen any questions about cash play and I've never seen anyone ask a question about one of the most defining tests of professional poker play: game selection.

The Victoria is now getting full at some point every night. That means a choice of seven games to those who have the right resources. I don't want to take the risks required in the #250 dealers most of the time, so for me there are six games: three #50 hold'em games and three games of either #100 omaha or #100 hold'em. Some nights it's two omaha games, other nights it's two hold'em games. It all depends on demand.

Faced with this choice, it's essential to be in the right game and that's where managing the lists is so important. To be a true pro, you should know who the wild players, who the rocks are and who the tricky players are. Not only that, but you should know their initials, so that you can spot how good a game is going to be by seeing who is on the list to play after someone leaves the game you are interested in. There is little point in being 7th on the list for what is now a great game if the 6 people on the list in front of you are all rocks or tricky. Equally, it can be worthwhile to be low on the list for what is a mediocre game now, if the people next on the list are complete maniacs.

To take matters a level further, it helps to know the movement patterns of your prey. Certain people never stay late, so you know that if you see them in a game at 10.30, it's likely that their seat will become available soon. Others only stay late if they are chasing, so if they are still there at midnight, it could mean that they are on tilt and much more value than would normally be the case.

So what I'm waiting for is a question like this on a forum somewhere:

Title: 'Question for the Mob (or Barry Martin, John Duthie, Harry Demetriou etc)

Question: 'I was in an adequate but not great #100 omaha game at 9.50 last night. I had VH on my right, who is a dead seat but always quits at either 10.30 or 11.00. A #100 hold'em game was just about to start and I saw many people I've not seen before waiting for it to start. That's usually a good sign, but often beginners don't sit down with a great deal of money and there was plenty on the table that I was on. Mr H. was totally smashed as usual and was third on the list for my game, but was also on the list for a #250 dealers if that started. There were three other names on the list for #250 dealers, however once his initials hit the whiteboard it was likely that others would follow, if they had the money for it. There didn't seem to be many people who played that size in the room, but a couple of possible takers were in the restaurant and if they dropped in to the card room on the way down and saw him, they would immediately want to play.

I thought that it would be a good idea to go into the hold'em in preference to the omaha game that I was in, because even though the beginners don't always have a lot of chips to start with, they do sometimes start pulling up hundreds and play loose until they have a large stack, rather as though it were a rebuy competition. But I didn't want to leave the omaha game if there was a possibility that Mr H. would take part.

What is to be done? If I go to the #100 game, I miss the chance to play Mr H. later, but if I stay he might never come to the game if the #250 dealers starts. Brian tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I wanted to move to the new hold'em game. What should I have done?"

That's the sort of dilemma that any Vic regular will recognise. Yet I never see it discussed on any forum.

Here's another situation I had last week. I was in a great #100 hold'em game at 1.00am and was asked whether I wanted to stay another hour. I had gone to bed at 2.30am the previous day, so I was probably only likely to stay for one more hour, two at the absolute maximum. However, the man who had just moved to my immediate left had a stinking cold - sneezing and spluttering every two minutes. Should that affect my decision?

In the end I decided that it should and quit the game. It wasn't worth risking a cold that knocked me out of action for a week in exchange for only one or two more hours of play in a good game. At times it amuses me to think that poker players pay money per hour to sit at a table with their heads adjacent to others in a way that would be regarded as a health and safety hazard in any office! Why do we tolerate people with colds playing live in the age of online poker. Tell them to go home!

And while we're at it, don't get me started on people who don't wash their hands when they go to the toilets. I can't count the number of times I've said to people 'But we're using the same cards and chips you know'.

If you think I'm being fussy, wait until you meet David Ulliott, an absolute hygiene fanatic. He once asked the floor manager at the Amsterdam casino to tell everyone who visited the bathroom during the break to wash their hands and got a round of applause for it! It's pathetic that grown-ups have to be told this. David refuses to take paper towels from the toilet attendents in the bathrooms at casinos. He doesn't want someone else's hands touching the paper he dries his with. Now there's some valuable free hand advice from one of the UK's leading card players!

Reversing Andy Ward's question
Over at the Pokersoft Diary, Andy Ward asks us who said the following:

"Why of course the people don't want war... That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

I don't know for sure. I won't cheat and look it up, so I'll give you my best guess, which is that it is by Josef Goebbels. I look forward to being told the correct answer in due course.

I wouldn't mention it on this site, were it not for the fact that he describes this quote as being 'apposite'. I take this to mean that he sees some parallels in the US-led war in Iraq and of course totally disagree. What's obvious in this day and age is how difficult it is to persuade some people to wake up out of their slumber and accept that there is a war going on! A disturbingly large number of people prefer to believe that the war is some scheme cooked up by Bush and Cheney to make profits for Halliburton, despite the sight of embassies falling down in Africa in 1998 (about 300 killed, mostly Africans) and about 3000 killed in New York and Washington, D.C. in 2001.

I could widen this by including the killing of about 200 in Bali in 2002, in which Islamic fundamentalists killed Australian and British surfers and backpackers with not a Zionist Israeli or registered Republican American in sight. But what's the point? The seductive appeal of the 'blame Bush' view is that it gives you a cheap way out. Simply vote Bush out and the problem is solved. Brilliant!

So I want to ask Andy this question: 'What do you make of someone who goes around telling the public that they aren't being attacked when they very obviously are?'

He's welcome to tell me that he doesn't see Iraq as being the main threat to the US and the UK. But I want to know first whether he actually accepts that someone is attacking us.