Monday, April 28, 2003

My daughter Mercedes, who just turned two last month, can now count to ten in Arabic.  I turned 32 this month, but I can only count to six.     10:14:30 PM    Let's hear it. []

Poker We just added to the DVD collection I swore I'd never have after a couple of Columbia House selections arrived. One of the movies is Rounders, which is a film starring Matt Damon, Ed Norton, John Turturro, and John Malkovich as Teddy KGB. There's a lot to it, and I enjoy the film for a lot of reasons. But the biggest reason I like it is because it's about poker. The poker scenes are realistic, the lingo true, and the depiction is exciting. I love playing poker, and I firmly believe that poker is absolutely one of the world's greatest games. And this from someone who adores playing games of all sorts. If you don't play poker much, you may wonder why in the world I would give it such high praise, as it has the reputation of a game that is determined largely, perhaps entirely by luck. But that's a total falsehood. Is there luck in poker? Absolutely. However, if the game is played at all well, the luck factor is diminished considerably. Poker is a great game because it requires a depth of psychological analysis that few other games have. Why did he make that bet? Is the timing of that raise relevant? He's been losing a lot--is there a chance he's on tilt (a player goes on tilt when they have a bad streak and they start playing wildly and aggressively in an attempt to win it all back fast)? She's smiling--did she catch the card she needed, or is that a bluff? What kind of players are these at this table? Aggressive, timid, wild, insane? Beyond that, truly great poker players--of which I am not--have incredibly sharp mathematical minds. Winning poker requires, at a minimum, an ability to quickly figure out what the best odds are for a particular card or set of cards turning up, and advanced poker requires comparing those odds against the amount of money both already in the pot and that, as a better, you'll have to put into the pot in future rounds of betting. Reading a How-To-Win-At-Poker book requires a reasonably advanced understanding of probability, as well as an ability to implement that understanding really quickly. Plus, there's the money. I'm not a bad low-stakes poker player. In your average bunch-of-guys-getting-together-to-play weekend game, I almost always win money, mostly because I understand when to fold and when to bet aggressively. The biggest mistake most casual players make is not folding, followed closely by calling rather than raising the bet. I couldn't be a high-stakes player, though, because in order to play for even moderate stakes you have to almost be unconscious about the amount of money you're playing with. I'm too aware of the amounts. Every poker book I've ever read talks about how the very best players and the pro players all drop thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars without thinking about it--they're just playing with chips, in their minds. I can't do that. I saw it in action, though, with a friend I knew a few years ago. He was a college student, but had decided to basically pay his way through by playing poker. I was in Michigan teaching at a summer debate camp, and we decided to go to the casino. We dropped by his house to get some money for him to play with, and he ran in and grabbed a rubber band-bound stack of $100 bills. 100 of them. $10,000. We got to the casino and basically went our separate ways, because I was playing Hold 'Em at the $4 - $8 table ($4 bet for the first two betting rounds, $8 for the last two rounds). He was playing at the $40-$80 table. I played for a couple of hours, played well, had some good cards, and won about $250. He decided to go ahead and stay after I left, and ultimately played all night. When I saw him the next day, he informed me that he'd lost $5000 that night. Basically, though, he shrugged it off, because he was still up over 20 grand for the month! It's a great game. But that is scary.   1:36:43 PM    Let's hear it. []