Champagne Parties and Caviar Dreams

Reading Hand Histories at Stakes Higher or Lower than your Own

J-Mac — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:43:46 +0000

(Yes, I've been wasting a bit of time on reddit recently)

Telling Poker Stories to Non-Poker Friends

J-Mac — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:44:35 +0000

I've been out of the game and the culture of poker for a while now and have been spending most of my time with the Muggles, and being out in the regular has really given me some perspective. When you're in poker (and you're doing it right), you're really in it, and you're studying the game and reading forums and your friends and/or roommates tend to be poker players too, so the poker world becomes weirdly normal. It's only now, years later, when I'm explaining that chunk of my life to, like, the mailman, that I think, huh, yeah, I guess it is kinda weird to pay your bills with a recreational card game.

But it's still a part of my life, so sometimes I try to share a really funny or interesting poker story to a non-poker player only to realize half-way through that it requires waaaaay too much backstory and explanation to someone not already initiated.

Case in point, there's an old photoshop thread on 2p2 where people photoshop poker players into movie posters. If I were to tell the story of my favorite post in that thread to a poker player, the MAXIMUM amount of explanation I would possibly need would be something like this:

"Okay, there's an old thread on 2p2 where people photoshop poker players into famous movie posters. Now, at the time, David Benyamine was playing a lot of high stakes PLO, and dataminers were noticing that he was playing, like, WAY tight from the button compared to everyone else, and no one could figure out why. So, in the photoshop thread, someone made . . ."

Hilarious, right! I know! Brilliant!

(By the way, the above poster was made, surprise surprise, by genius poster Eponymous. Link to thread. Link to Post.)

Here's how it goes when I try to tell that story to a non-poker playing friend.

"Okay, so there was this thread on 2p2, where . . . twoplustwo. It's like, the most popular place for poker players to get together online to discuss poker strategy and stuff. Anyways, there's a thread where they photoshop poker players into famous movie posters, and . . . well, no, I guess it's not all strategy discussion, there are a few lower content forums where people post, like, funny stuff. Anyways, there is this guy named David Benyamine who . . . , no, Benyamine. I dunno, Israeli? No, no, he's French I think. I don't know. It doesn't matter. Anyways, he was playing a lot of PLO at the time, and . . . PLO. Pot-Limit Omaha. It's a card game. Yeah, it's a lot like Hold 'Em, except you get four cards instead of two, but you can only use two cards in your hand at a time and, wait a minute, why am I even explaining this part? Anyways, people were noticing that . . .hmmm. How to explain this? All right, so the last person to act in each poker betting round, well, except the first one [holy shit this story is totally not worth it but there is NO WAY I can abandon it now], that person is called 'the button', and it's a very big statistical advantage, so most poker players tend to play very aggressively from the button, but this guy, this Benyamine, he . . . hey guys, where are you going? Hey guys? Come back, I'm almost done!"

"Guys??"

Ten Thousand Days

J-Mac — Tue, 17 May 2011 04:47:30 +0000

I was born on December 29th, 1983. I'm writing this on May 16th, 2011. That means as of today, I am exactly ten thousand days old.

(Note: because some of you reading this will be left-brained, analytically-minded, cleverer-than-thou poker player types you will instinctively think to yourself something like, "Huh, I wonder if he remembered to count Leap Days when he calculated that number." Fortunately, since I am also a left-brained, analytically-minded, cleverer-than-thou poker player type, trust me, I have.)

(But some of you poker player types are going to double-check that figure anyway.)

Years are a more convenient way to track age, but when you think about it, every way of measuring time except tracking the number of days requires something external. You'll notice the gradual recurrence of seasons as years pass, but without a calendar it would be very difficult to know exactly when one year ended and the next one began, and without a clock it's basically impossible to know exactly when a minute or an hour has elapsed, so, really, the most natural and obvious way to track the passage of time on this planet is counting sunrise-to-sunrise. It's so natural that I cannot imagine we as a species started tracking time any other way.

So tracking days is a meaningful way to measure time and today I have been through exactly ten thousand of them. I don't remember the day I turned one thousand days old (which I forgive myself for, it turns out I was only two years old) and, barring some medical advances that allow people to routinely live more than 270 years, I won't live to see my 100,000th. Additionally, since statistically it's unlikely I make it to 100 years and, while I will hit a billion seconds sometime when I'm 31, I'll only be able to really appreciate that for, well, one second, that makes today the only really big odometer-click that I'm going to have in my conscious life. So I think that makes it a pretty good moment to reflect on what my life has been like over these first ten thousand days.

So, first of all, how did I spend my ten thousandth day?

I currently work as a waiter in a Brooklyn restaurant. Today I had a shift and, following that, an unpaid post-work meeting. That means that I was at work for twelve hours, three of those for free, walked out with all of seventy-nine dollars and my professional day ended with me mopping floors and hauling out bags of garbage by hand. Thanks to poker, a not-insignificant number of my friends are self-made millionaires and my professional life is at the mop bucket and garbage bag level.

So here's the look in the mirror: I'm single. I don't make much money. I don't have health insurance. I drink too much. Durrrr, Jason Rosenkrantz, Mark Zuckerberg and LeBron James are younger than me. I ate a cold bologna sandwich for dinner tonight. I still have a flip phone.

You might think all this makes today a pretty depressing day for me. But it's not. I actually feel pretty goddamn great. All in all, my first ten thousand days have been pretty fucking terrific.

It starts with my family. I'm not going to drone on about it, but the fact is I have a mother, father, brother and sister who are all amazing people that I love dearly and, if that is taken care of, a lot of other shit just falls by the wayside.

And my parents work for the US State Department, which means I spent my childhood moving all over the world. This means the list of experiences I've had is, if I'm being honest with myself, just unfair. I've been to the Taj Mahal. I've watched the sun rise over the dunes of the Sahara desert. I've watched it set over the Seine. I've kayaked down the Zambezi river, I've ridden dune-buggies through the Kalahari, I've gotten drunk on the streets of Amsterdam, and I've run across a Mozambican beach at midnight. I have an at least semi-informed opinion on two dozen of the world's great cities. Alexander the Great didn't have that depth of travel experience. For God's sake, my parents just took us on a week-long vacation to St. Maarten. Down there the ocean is the color of Tiffany jewelry boxes and is the temperature of bath water. On top of that, beer costs a dollar and the place is lousy with Dutch girls. I mean, Jesus. Dutch women might just be God's Final Draft.

And I'm definitely personally very lucky. I'm healthy. I feel as smart and as talented as a person could ask to be. Hell, I'm not even bad-looking! Well, I mean, my ears sorta stick out a helluva lot, and a girl is pretty much going to have to find that kind of charming or she's not going to be able to get past it, but beyond that, hey, you could do worse.

On top of all that, in my life I made about a hundred thousand dollars playing a card game and used the money to do things like buy expensive champagne and ski through the French Alps. Now, it did take me five whole years to make that hundred thousand, so maybe I should have saved a little of it instead of frittering it away on unnecessary luxury goods, but that is a lesson for another time.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I have amazing friends. Thanks to my friends I have partied in $5,000-a-night cabanas at luxurious Las Vegas casinos while my personal bank account probably held all of six hundred bucks. Thanks to them I've eaten a piece of a thousand dollar sushi roll. Thanks to them I've been on fucking television. I mean, granted, it was just in the background of one episode of a poker reality show, and I was wearing a silly balloon hat for part of it, but hey, I'll take it.

But sometimes it wasn't anything like that. Sometimes it was just hanging out and playing Mario Strikers, and while that isn't as fun a story, in some ways it was just as good as anything else. And, believe it or not, I also have a few friends who don't play poker, and they are some of the most creative, intelligent and warm people you could know. Thanks to them I know that eating cold barbecue off of a paper plate on a Brooklyn rooftop can be just as fun as the shiniest, most expensive Las Vegas casino. They're the kind of friends that make you a better person, and I'm grateful to them all.

Also, not to be a shallow asshole or anything, but I have dated some beautiful women in my time. Seriously. Ones that made me think, "Man, she's amazing. Ahh, if only . . ." and then all of a sudden she's right there, and she's blushing and smiling at something I just said! Me! The guy with the ears! Even now, I look back at some of those and think to myself, "Well how in the fuck did that happen??"

And I've had that moment where you think there's one person who is the most incredible, amazing person you've ever met and unbelievably, magically, impossibly, she thinks you are the most incredible, amazing person to her, and the whole fucking world just falls away and you just feel like you've won. Even if years pass and it doesn't work out or things change or you realize you were wrong or naive or whatever, that moment, that one fucking moment? That's the BEST.

Plus I live in a world that has produced Fender Stratocasters, high-end steakhouses, Scarlett Johansson, iPhones, the music of Beethoven, Sam Cooke, and Big L, and seasons 4 through 9 of The Simpsons.

After all that, I don't mind picking up a mop so much.

As you get older, you can get bogged down in the difficulties and small injustices that come your way in the course of your normal days. It's important, every now and then, to take a moment and step back and say, you know what, all in all, life can be pretty fucking awesome.

Even if it's only once every ten thousand days.

Whitelime's Reaction to Black Friday

J-Mac — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 22:21:50 +0000

I saw Emil (a.k.a whitelime) at Jay(a.k.a. KRANTZ)'s apartment last night. Emil is still very much a high-stakes online grinder, and I knew the recent events must have hit him pretty hard. So I asked him how he found out about the shutdown and how he reacted. Here's what he said.

"Well, I was out golfing and I got a text from [mutual non-poker-playing friend] saying something about the DOJ shutting things down and legalization looking like a long-shot. It was a little concerning, but I get legalization texts from non-poker-playing friends all the time, so I didn't think much of it. I got through the first 9 holes and my phone buzzed again and I checked the screen and saw that it was Dani [a.k.a Ansky]. Immediately, I knew that if Dani was texting me that it was going to be bad, bad news. That's when I learned about everything getting shut down."

He paused there for a moment, and I imagined him, standing there on that golf course, learning that his entire way of life had just changed, possibly forever. I remember UIGEA day, but I've been out of the game a while, and Emil has stuck through it. Plus I never played high stakes, so I couldn't really imagine what that must be like to have it all come crashing down with a text message. He continued:

"So then I asked myself, is there anything I can do, right now, to improve the situation? And I decided no, no there wasn't.

So I said, fuck it, and played the back nine."

A Post About Running Badly. Literally.

J-Mac — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 05:21:34 +0000

I was out jogging and I deftly snaked past a mom, dad and a toddler on the sidewalk while listening to "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted". I felt like a badass until three steps later when my toe got caught in the shoelace loop of my other shoe and I faceplanted onto the Brooklyn concrete. My earbuds snap off just in time for me to hear the dad say, "Hey, are you okay?" Obviously I was too embarrassed to do anything except say, "Ha, I'm fine!" a little too loudly and immediately start running again and pretend like my elbows and palms weren't bleeding. But if I had any presence of mind I would have gone up to the toddler and said, "I'm out here running trying to get healthier and look better and I just fell and injured myself and looked like a total jackass in the process. When you get older and learn about the concept of situational irony, this will become hilarious."

OT: A Facebook update I'm pleased with

J-Mac — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:57:06 +0000

I was listening to Pandora radio and getting annoyed with the amount of ads they play and I decided to take my frustration to facebook. After the initial update, I found my interest piqued.

If you can entertain the idea of product placement in a Lil Wayne song without coming up with your own verse of same, then you have more restraint than I.

The Ndebele word for "Tilt"

J-Mac — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 06:44:42 +0000

There was a thread on 2p2 a while back titled "Websites you never made" where people posted web business ideas they had had but never ended up making for whatever reason. I had been kicking around an idea for a website called betterthanenglish.com, a site that would post a new interesting foreign word each day that had no direct English translation. Unfortunately, I knew zero things about how to make an actual website so I posted my idea in the thread and gave it to the Internet.

Incredibly, the OP of the thread liked the idea and actually turned it into a real website. It's now one of my favorite feeds in my Google Reader and I check it every day. The resourcefulness of the Internet truly amazes me.

I particularly enjoy reading the site because, on a very real level, I feel like the site was literally made for me. Especially when I saw yesterday's word, Dii-KOYNA, an Ndebele word which means "to destroy one's own property in anger".

Who would have thought my interest in untranslatable words and my own particular favorite brand of tilt would come together so harmoniously?

A Poker Player's "Bull Durham"

J-Mac — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:34:52 +0000

"You know what the difference between breakeven and a 3 bb/100 winner is? It's one buy-in a session. One buy-in is 50 ptbb, okay? 3 hours in a session 6-tabling, that's about 1700 hands. That means if you win just one extra buy-in a session - just one - a flip, you hit a flush draw, you, you make a three-barrel that works, you make a good river fold. . .just one more good river fold a session...and you're at RailHeaven. "

Emil and the Drunken Asian Businessman

J-Mac — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 02:25:59 +0000

One summer I was in Vegas with Emil and some friends. We were at the Bellagio and wanted to shoot some craps so we found a table and set up shop.

That's when we noticed why this table was special. At one end of the table was a remarkably inebriated Asian businessman. He was skinny, thirtyish, wearing a pinstriped button-down shirt with the top button unbuttoned, and was absolutely hammered. The room was pretty crowded but people were giving him a wild berth, which he used to wobble back and forth as he placed his bets. The rest of the table was tourists making $10 and $20 bets, but in front of tihs guy were sloppy, fat piles of purple $500 chips and yellow $1000 chips. He was cackling to himself and speaking loudly in slurred, accented English.

The dice came around to Emil and the dealer announced, "New shewt-ahh!"

"New shootah??!" The Asian businessman asked incredulously, as if such an act were completely unprecendented in the history of craps tables. "Who issit??" He demanded. The dealer motioned at Emil.

"Lemme lookat'm." The businessman announced to no one in particular. He leaned across the table until his face was three feet away from Emil's and stared. He squinted and raised an eyebrow, as if Emil was some archaeological artifact to be scrutinized and deciphered.

For five long and bizarre seconds the businessman stared at Emil. Emil stood frozen in a state of "What the fuck?" Then, abruptly, the businessman shouted, "HA!" and snapped bolt upright and grabbed some chips.

...and bet $3500 on "Don't Pass."

Graph: Your Poker Results vs. How Interesting Your Poker Stories Are

J-Mac — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 22:20:29 +0000

(Click for make big)Â

The Home Game

J-Mac — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:33:46 +0000

Whenever I think about my favorite poker memories, my mind always goes back to the home games I played in college. To me, that was when poker was the most fun, the most exciting. Back before it was all grind and rakeback and downswings and equity calculations, back when it was beers and bad play and never winning or losing more than fifty bucks in a night. I was so new to the game then. God help me, in those days I would actually call 10-2 "The Doyle Brunson". Those words earnestly came out of my mouth and I sincerely thought I was being super cool when I said them. Ivey forgive me. But man, those dorm games were exciting. Â

Once poker became a thing I did online professionally instead of in a dorm room for fun, that excitement started to fade. One day, after a middling online session and I guess one too many clicks of a mouse, I decided I wanted to play in a low-stakes home game again. I missed playing with friends. I missed the jokes. I missed dragging real chips over to my stack after I won a hand. Â I wanted to do all that again.Â

I called up some friends and told them I was hosting a game. A few shared my nostalgia and agreed to come over. I was living with Jay and Emil at the time (who by this point were already highly successful high stakes players) and I convinced them to play too.Â

We were living at 2 Gold Street, which is a 52-story apartment building downtown with a spectacular rooftop with round wooden tables and an exceptional view of the city. It was the perfect place to hang out and play a little cards. So I dragged out the old folding felt tabletop and the 500 chip set I bought on eBay when I was just starting out, my friend grabbed a case of beer, and we were ready to go.Â

As we were setting it up, it felt just like old times. Better. All the tactile sensations I remembered were coming back. The cold beer bottle. The familiar feel and heft of the 11.5 gram chips as they shuffled between my fingers. The bounce of the felt. The stiff plastic of the Kem playing cards. Â This was going to be great. I dealt the first hand.

Emil and Jay peeked at their cards and darted their eyes around the table. "Raise." "Reraise".

The people at the table who were NOT Jay and Emil looked around at each other. "Hey, waaaaaaait a minute..."

Then, and only then, did I realize I hadn't set up a poker game with buddies. That wasn't the same Emil Patel across the table that I had sparred with all those years ago in an NYU poker game. That Emil was at least a million hands younger than the one I was looking at now. And now KRANTZ was in the game too. I had set up a poker game with KRANTZ and whitelime, two long-time high stakes poker regulars who made themselves millionaires by outthinking people at a poker table.Â

When most people set up a poker game it's because they want to play high stakes against opponents they consider themselves much better than. I had done the exact opposite. I had set up a low-stakes match against players who were far, far superior.Â

Shit, I thought, as I folded the first hand of the night and took a sip of my beer. I've created the the worst ten-dollar card game in America.

The Most Useless Blog Update Ever

J-Mac — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 18:44:02 +0000

Hey guys, sorry I haven't updated this blog in a while, been super busy lolz.Â

Played some poker today. I played a tournament. First I had a little chips, but then I played some hands and I had a lot of chips, but then I played some more hands and I lost all my chips. I think I played good for the most part except for the times I played bad and made some mistakes.Â

I ate some food today. It was good.Â

Not sure what I'll do with the rest of the day. Maybe I'll go to the gym. I dunno. Â I also watched some movies and TV shows recently. My opinions on them range.Â

I took a quiz on facebook. "Which Classic Empire Are You?" Â It said I was Byzantine but I just KNOW it should be Ottoman, lolz!

Okay that's all I can think of right now but I'm super going to try to update this blog more often lolz!!

:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

Currently Listening To: Katy Perry - California Gurls

Current Mood: Bespectacled

Current Color: Mauve

I started a Twitter account

J-Mac — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 21:03:20 +0000

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog to say that I have reluctantly joined 2008 and started my own Twitter account. Â It's not poker-related, it's mostly just short little jokes I think of. I like coming up with them and maybe someone who reads this blog will enjoy reading them. Check it out.

http://twitter.com/#!/johncmcnamara

Jay's Bow Tie New Year's Eve

J-Mac — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:52:00 +0000

First, a side story: my sister was once out to a buffet-style lunch with a friend. While reading the index cards next to each tray, the friend suddenly stopped and said, "Bode pasta?", pronouncing the word "Bode" like the name of the skier Bode Miller, "What the hell is Bode pasta?"

My sister looked at the index card her friend was reading from: Bowtie pasta.Â

There's a great moment in the last episode of "2 Months, 2 Million". All the guys are sitting around a table discussing their end-of-summer party. It's going to be held at the house and it's going to be on the show so it ideally should capture themes like Vegas, gambling, poker, et cetera. Suddenly, Jay's eyes gleam and he says, like it was the most obvious, natural thing in the world, "PiÃ±atas!"Â

Jay's not the type to ignore a good party idea just because it comes out of absolutely nowhere. That's why it came as no surprise when he said that at his New Year's Eve party all of the men in attendance MUST be wearing bow ties. Not REGULAR ties, mind you, which for a crowd of online poker players are already as foreign an object as condoms are to nuns, but BOW ties.Â

So now the task was obtaining a bow tie and learning how to tie it before December 31st. I have a father who, completely inexplicably, regularly wears real bow ties, so getting one was not a problem. Learning to tie one, however, was. "Why didn't you just get a clip-on?" you might ask. Â Well, why didn't I just wear a dress? The unspoken protocol of a Rosenkrantz bow tie party is you wear a REAL goddamn bow tie that you tied YOURSELF or you take your Mike's Hard Lemonade into the corner and talk about The Real Housewives of Orange Fleshtone with Harvey Fierstein (who, by the way, is wearing a real goddamn bow tie he tied himself, you fumbling nancyboy).

As ever in the internet age, step one of figuring out how to tie a bow tie involved going to Youtube and typing "how to tie a bow tie". Â The first result, as you'll see, is this video right here:Â http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJv4Qh7zR3E. In it, a proper gentleman with a calming Southern accent walks you through it step-by-step. It takes seventy seconds. What could be easier?

Well, a lot of things, it turns out. Learning Sanskrit by mail comes to mind. I spent over an hour staring in a mirror making abortive, ham-fisted attempts to tie my borrowed bow tie, ending up time and time again with something that a retarded kindergartener would be too embarrassed to bring home to his parents.Â

If you read my previous blog post about how I deal with tilt, you can guess that I didn't handle this gracefully.Â

I must have watched that calm Southern gentleman explain it thirty times. By the end I was screaming things like, "The FUCK does 'cinch it down' mean?! 'Snap it shut'?! The FUCK?? Do you see a motherfucking button on this thing?! Do you?! Fuck you! I hope you choke at a Cracker Barrel! FUCK YOU!!"

Then, all of a sudden, I did it. I tugged the fabric of the tie for the sixty-third time and when I dropped my hands, what was left clearly resembled a tied bow tie. I couldn't believe it. I stared at it in the mirror for thirty seconds. Then I untied the tie and tried it again. Again, success. Â It was like watching your son walk for the first time.Â

Now the world was all sunshine and roses. I hopped on the train and went to Jay's with my crisply-tied bow tie. When I got to the party I was one of the first guests there. Jay was still in his room getting ready behind a closed door. Then, all of a sudden I heard him shout, "The FUCK?!"

I listened more closely. That's when I noticed there was sound coming from the speakers on the computer in his room. I leaned in, and I realized it was a voice.

A very, very familiar Southern voice.Â

"Cinch it down."

P.S. There absolutely were piÃ±atas at the end-of-summer "2 Months, 2 Million" party.

P.P.S. Eventually Jay, too, mastered the bow tie with the help of the Southern gentleman. And at the party every single man, without exception, wore a tied bow tie.Â

Rage Against the Machine's Accessories

J-Mac — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:46:42 +0000

Four different folding chairs.

A half dozen mice. At least.

A dozen keyboards. At least.

An Ikea computer desk.

A sliding glass shower door.

A chest of drawers, one drawer at a time.

These are the things I have destroyed in a blind rage during my poker career.Â

Ridiculous? Yes. Immature? Completely. Â Signs of emotional unpreparedness for a profession as volatile as online poker? Â Without doubt. Â But true nevertheless? Sadly, yes.Â

Oh, sure, it started off slow. Maybe just a muttered, "Goddammit" at first, or gritting my teeth tighly. But eventually that wasn't enough to meet my tilt fix. Soon I graduated to the hard stuff. Literally. Physically hard stuff. I remember that chest of drawers being hard as hell.

Of course, I didn't WANT to break stuff when I tilted. I would employ psychological tricks to try to stop myself. Once I went out and bought a fancy seventy dollar wireless mouse. I figured if I had an expensive mouse I would be deterred from breaking it. Turns out I was wrong about myself. Another time I stood in a Best Buy and contemplated buying keyboards three or four at a time, just to save myself a few trips. Frankly, a thought like that should tell you that you have a problem.Â

In the smashing keyboard versus smashing mouse debate, I have to come down in favor of smashing keyboards. Sure, you can hurl a wireless mouse at a wall, and you can swing a wired mouse like the villainess from Kill Bill, but usually you'll just crack the case, maybe send the right-mouse button flying off somewhere. Â But a keyboard, on the other hand . . . a keyboard you can grab by the edge, raise over your head, and overhead slam down hardÂ on a desk and get a really satisfying THWACK, plus the accompanying harmonic overtones of individual keys spraying out across the room and clattering like plastic rain drops. Of course, inevitably you'll miss a couple of those keys when you clean up and you'll only find them when you painfully step on them in bare feet in the middle of the night. Fact.Â

In that period after you smash your keyboard or your mouse but before you drag yourself to the electronics store to replace it, you find ways to make do. I am an expert at using computers using only EITHER a keyboard or a mouse. Keyboard's easier. With a mouse you can only chat with friends online by copy-pasting words and sentences from a website like the New York Times, so I always end up talking to my friends about some oil shortage in Panama. Â I come across as insightful but dull.

Sometimes after a singular bad hand you just smash your fist into your keyboard once and it doesn't break completely but a few keys stop working. I have gone weeks copying and pasting every time I needed to use a letter 'k'. Oftentimes you simply change your word choice. "Sorry if my typing is strange. Â I bro . . . [pause] . . . [backspace][backspace][backspace] . . . damaged my . . . [pause] . . . computer typing board."

I was clearly the leader in overblown violent tilt in our apartment but Jay and Emil would also indulge from time to time. Once, while Jay and Emil were in the middle of a nosebleed downswing, I returned to the apartment from a weekend away to find that our coffee table had disappeared. When I asked Jay what happened, he told me Emil had smashed it to splinters with a baseball bat. Jay had a calm, disinterested look as he told the story, like Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction. "I'm sorry John, I had to crash that Honda." Â

Of course, Jay and Emil had just lost over a million dollars between them and the coffee table was a six dollar find at Goodwill. The sacrifice of the coffee table was pretty well justified. It seemed to provide some catharsis and they both moved on successfully with their lives.Â

A year later Jay and Emil were both on 2 Months, 2 Million and Jay had the idea for a dedicated Tilt Room, a place to vent frustration by smashing fruits with baseball bats. Reactions to the Tilt Room were mixed. Â Some viewers said, "That's so awesome!" Others said, "That's so wasteful!"

I just shook my head. "Watermelons." I thought to myself. "Why didn't I just buy some goddamned watermelons."

My Two Plus Two Novel - OR - The Cognitive Surplus

J-Mac — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:03:37 +0000

I have been a member of the twoplustwo forum for almost six years now. As of this blog post I have 1,935 posts on that forum. Â Out of curiosity, I wondered how many words I had typed, total, in those nearly two thousand posts. Â I opened up my twenty most recent posts and found I average 48.4 words per post. Â For reference, that means an average forum post of mine is as long as this blog post up until right before the word 'recent' in the previous sentence. Nothing especially long, really.Â

However, 48.4 times 1,935 posts equals 93,654 words. The average novel is about 100,000 words. Â That means I have written the equivalent of a full length novel, on the internet, on a poker forum, fifty words at a time. I find that a little embarassing.

And yet I am nowhere near being one of the most prolific member of the twoplustwo forums. Not even close. Â There are posters who have tens of thousands of posts on that forum. Â There is a poster with well over 40,000 posts who averages about a hundred and seventy words a post. Â That works out to seven point five million words published to that site. Â That is seventy-five full-length novels. To put that in perspective, Stephen King, who has done a little bit of writing in his time, has published (only) about fifty novels. To further put that in perspective, the King James Bible has an estimated 750,000 words, which means this poster has written the equivalent of ten full-length Bibles on an Internet poker forum. To put that even further in perspective, if you started typing full time right now with no breaks at sixty words a minute and forty hours a week, it would take you a full year to type that many words.Â

I could go on, but Jesus, you get the point: that's a lot of writing.Â

When you remember that the Internet didin't really exist as recently as twenty years ago, it's amazing to think of how much effort gets directed there.Â

It made me think of a lecture I saw recently on something called "the cognitive surplus", which is the staggering amount of human effort that gets misdirected or wasted. Â The critical stat was pointing out that Americans, just Americans, watch about 200 billion hours of television a year, and the entire Wikipedia project, every line of code, every article written, every edit, in every language since the beginning of project, has taken about 100 million hours total, which means if Americans redirected their efforts, they could make as many as 2,000 Wikipedia-sized projects every single year.

Here's a link to the lecture. It's interesting stuff:http://laughingsquid.com/clay-shirky-on-cognitive-surplus/

It makes you think about how you direct your time and effort. Maybe I'll use the next hundred thousand words I write more productively and actually write that novel, instead of doling them out uselessly fifty words at a time in low-content forum posts. Â Maybe I'll start today!

Actually, maybe I'll start tomorrow. First I want to learn what everyone on OOT had for lunch. Â Then I should probably post my own.Â

Brian Roberts' New Computer

J-Mac — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:18:08 +0000

Brian Roberts needed a new computer. He needed a new computer because his desktop wasn't capable of running his Dell 30" monitor at full resolution, and, it turns out, neither was the replacement laptop that he just got specifically to run his Dell 30" monitor at full resolution. Â It seems just thinking, "Hey, it's a brand-new laptop, it HAS to be able to run a 30, right?" is not an effective substitute for a dual-link DVI port actually physically existing on the computer.

So we head down to the local Best Buy or Gadget Hut or Computers'n'Shit or whatever the big electronics store is called in Las Vegas so Brian Roberts can buy a third computer, his second brand new computer in a week, so he can have three computers in a house he will only live in for another few weeks. Â And the weird thing to me about all this is, paradoxically, that it's not weird at all. When it's the difference between awkwardly three-tabling or comfortably nine- or ten-tabling online poker for hours a day for the next three weeks with upwards of fifty thousand dollars in play at all times, spending twelve hundred dollars on a third brand new computer not only ceases to be ridiculous, it actually becomes honest-to-goddamn financially prudent.Â

So Brian gets the computer and Jay, Brian and I head back to the house and stop off on the way to pick up Jay's dry-cleaning. I hop out of the car and go into the deli to buy a soda. Â

When I come out I see the car, a late-model black Mercedes CLK convertible (1) with the top down, (2) with the brand new computer lying unsecured in the back seat (3) with the driver's side door open (4) with the keys in the ignition (5) with the engine running and (6) with absolutely nobody around. No Brian, no Jay, no nobody at all around this car.

I don't know if car thieves have wet dreams, but if they do, they probably look something like that. Â

I walk past the car and find Brian and Jay in the dry-cleaners. They're kind of near the car, but I can't help but think that a clever and quick thief could easily hop in and speed away with the car without us being able to stop him at this distance. As I'm thinking this, Brian finally says, "actually, I better go stand near the car."

Then he continues, "Someone might steal the computer."

So in Brian Roberts' mind, which, by the way, is a brilliant mind, a mind that can figure out that a high-level high stakes poker player is playing a flush draw differently than he normally would (and why he is doing so) by fourth street, in that mind, thieves walk past running, abandoned Mercedes convertibles, with keys in the ignition, and decide to grab bulky twelve hundred dollar desktop computers out of the back seat and take off running.

I look at him baffled. "Brian," I say plainly, "they'll just steal the fucking car."

"Ah." he says. "There's that, too."

This would be a better blog post if I could end it by saying, and at that moment someone ran up and stole the car. Â But the reality is Jay got his dry-cleaning and we got back in the car and went home without incident. But I'm okay with the sacrifice to the blog, because if the car had been stolen we would have had been stuck dealing with police reports and insurance headaches and the general unpleasantness of car thievery.

And, of course, Brian would have had to buy a fourth computer.Â

Shooting Dice with Jonas

J-Mac — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:47:35 +0000

2p2er riverboatking, a.k.a. Jonas, was recently in a pretty bad motorcycle accident. Â Thankfully, and borderline miraculously, he is alive and conscious and seems to be through the worst of it, and the author of this blog is grateful for that and wishes him a speedy and complete recovery.

But the thing about it is, for anyone who doesn't know Jonas, being in and surviving a brutal motorcycle accident is, well, a very Jonas thing to do. Â That's the kind of James Dean - slash - The-Most-Interesting-Man-in-the-World hijinks he's always getting himself into. Â If it's not riding motorcycles, it's doing backflips on a snowboard or hustling pool or playing high stakes poker or gambling in the high stakes lounge at the Bellagio, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If he were any closer to the edge, he'd be the lead singer of U2.

(By the way, that may be the worst goddamned joke I've ever written, which is exactly why I love it and am keeping it in.)

So as I wish him a speedy recovery so I can get back to living vicariously through his general badassery, I will share a Jonas story from this summer.

Jonas might be the best gambler I know. And I don't mean that he's necessarily a steal-every-edge, always look for an angle, Sky Masterson style gambler. I mean he's not afraid to bet anything on anything, to the point where saying, "sharing a Jonas story" is basically equivalent to saying, "sharing a gambling story". Â The summer they filmed the pilot for 2M2MM (a year before they filmed the show) I watched him and Brian Roberts play four handed five card omaha hi flips against each other for $100 a point for an hour. Â It was essentially a needlessly complicated coinflipping game of their own maniacal design that used half the deck, with Brian and Jonas providing running commentary all the while as they turned over the cards one by one: ("okay, you need a Jack, a red six, or an odd number lower than nine unless I turn over the queen of clubs in this hand here. Oh! Now there's an ace on the board! This changes everything, now you need an UNO Draw Four Wild card or a Black Lotus or a MewTwo...") Â In most rational circles of the world, this would be a bizarre and ridiculous activity. In the world of Jonas, this is Tuesday.

Incredibly, astoundingly, unfathomably, before this summer Jonas had never learned how to play craps. It wasn't until this summer that Ariel Schneller taught him, which is like learning the dark side of the Force from Darth Vader. Unsurprisingly, Jonas quickly decided that craps could be a fun and entertaining pasttime, something right in his wheelhouse.Â

So one night at the Aria after a DC meetup Jonas convinces about a half dozen of us to go play this new game he has just discovered. A group of us head to the craps tables, where we find a game that has about four open spots on one end of the table and a group of about four thirtysomething women at the other. We set up camp.

To say that Jonas took to the table like a duck in water would be an understatement. He took to it like water in water. Â Within sixty seconds he was king of the table. He chatted up each shooter, he joked with the women about their kids as they rolled ("What's your daughter's name? Cassie? Â Come on, let's make some money here, send Cassie to a good college! Ouch! Seven! Cassie's going to DeVry!") all while betting between $50 and $400 on the passline, max odds, continuous come. And that was just for starters. He tossed out hard-ways bets for the dealers, he ordered rounds of top shelf booze for the ladies when they started hitting numbers ("What's your drink, Veronica? Vodka cran? Of COURSE it's vodka cran. It's never anything else! Waitress, Ketel One and Cran for our creative Veronica over there!") he would sneak out wonky obscure bets on the table and toss black chips at them just to keep it interesting. Â I think the dealers had to literally invent brand new bets on the fly just to keep up with him. ("Yo dealer, I got fifty on all Fibonacci numbers!") Â And all of this while keeping up continuous chatter in that rolling cadence that exists at a craps table: "COME on now, BIG shewt-AAAH! BIG shewt-AAAH!"

I remember watching him and thinking, this is literally everything you can POSSIBLY do at a craps table.

After a mostly profitable hour of this whirlwind, the guys decide they're done and they tell Jonas that they're finished and were going to get some food. And I'll never forget it, at that moment Hurricane Jonas, who for the last hour has been the Atlas of Las Vegas, seemingly single-handedly supporting the entire city on his shoulders, shrugged and said, "Yeah, me too. I'm pretty bored." Â

I couldn't help but wonder, if this madness is boring, what the hell counts as exciting?

We started walking to the restaurant. Â We made it about twelve feet before Jonas stopped at a roulette table and, with the distracted nonchalance of a man brushing away a fly, dropped two yellow thousand dollar chips on "19-36". Â Ten seconds ago we were walking to breakfast. Now he's betting thousands of dollars on a single spin of roulette. As I shook my head and looked on with the feeling of stunned bemusement that is the hallmark of my dealings with Jonas, the wheel spun and the ball landed on 31 black.

Jonas casually picked up four thousand dollars worth of chips. Â All he said was, "Cool. Let's get some waffles."

Maybe my favorite Emil story...

J-Mac — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:21:51 +0000

The following very well may be my Â favorite Emil story, which is interesting because a) it has nothing to do with poker and b) I wasn't even there when it happened. Nevertheless, ever since I heard it, I have always retold it, and I have always enjoyed it.Â

During our junior year of college, Emil went out to the bars one night with some friends. At the end of the night everyone was hammered and starving so they went to a 24 hour deli/sandwich shop. While the other guys clamored at the register ordering huge sandwiches or whatever, Emil stood at the other end of the counter, Â staring at a tray of huge cookies in the plexiglass dessert display case.Â

For five full minutes Emil stood in silence staring at the cookies. Finally, a deli guy came over. "Can I help you, sir?" He asked.Â

"Yeah," said Emil, without moving his eyes from the giant cookie tray. "I'm gonna need five of those cookies."

"FIVE?" asked the deli guy incredulously. These were huge deli cookies, probably five inches across. No one would ever need or want more than two. "Are you sure you want FIVE??"

Emil thought for a moment. "You're right." said Emil, nodding but not taking his eyes off the cookies.Â "Better make it six."

My balla new setup

J-Mac — Tue, 25 May 2010 01:46:24 +0000

I used to have a 20" Samsung 204b LCD monitor like half of all poker grinders. I was gonna get another one to have a nice, symmetrical set-up, but I never got around to it, so I used an old, fat Samsung CRT I had had for a couple of years. Â When the LCD died a while back, I was left with only the CRT. I wasn't playing poker at the time, so I didn't bother getting a new second monitor.Â

Recently, I decided it was time to go back to twins. I asked around to see what monitors all the cool kids are using these days. Apparently the most popular setups for poker grinders are a 30" with one or two rotated 20"s on the side or twin 24" widescreens. After pricing that out, I realized I didn't feel like going out and dropping $700+ on new monitorage, so I started looking elsewhere.Â

As is always the case these days, "elsewhere" means one thing: craigslist.

I searched for "monitor" in NYC and there it was: Viewsonic p95f+ 19" CRT monitor for sale - $20.Â Â

Fuck YES!

I googled a review of the monitor model. It said, "A very good monitor, although CRT is pretty much an obsolete technology." The review was dated January 2003. January two thousand and three!! This thing was obsolete before Moneymaker even started the main event. I googled the specs of the monitor: 18.5" by 18.5" by 18.8", 55lbs. Fifty-five pounds! Â That's a second grader for Christ's sake. This behemoth, which according to the reviews could deliver as much as 2048x1536 resolution with a 0.25 mm dot pitch, could be mine for less than the cost of a taxi ride. Done fucking deal. Â This thing must be mine.Â

To add to the adventure, the ad said the monitor was on the Upper East Side, a full hour each way from my Brooklyn apartment. Now some people might say, who would spend two hours on the subway, half of which would be spent dragging a ferociously heavy, unwieldy, and yet remarkably fragile box up and down stairs and across platforms? Â Furthermore, who would go through all that rigamarole for a big heavy box that was laughably out-of-date?

To those who would say such things, I would respond, perhaps you didn't hear me: twenty bucks for a 2048x1536 monitor. Twenty. Â

And yes, I said, "rigamarole" back there. This is a post about a 19" CRT monitor. Shit's getting retro here.Â

I dashed off an e-mail to the seller and told him I would buy it. Now the question was one of logistics. Now the question was one of logistics. I had to make sure I could actually move the thing. My roommates have one of those wire carts that people in the city use to schlep around their groceries, but a quick test with my Samsung CRT confirmed there was no way this thing would fit in there (although trying to fit the giant monitor into the tiny cart did remind me of a joke: what do you get when you cross an elephant with a poodle? A dead poodle, split in half.)

So the only viable option was an open hand cart, but I needed bungee cords. I went to the hardware store and got four 4-foot bungees with carabiner clips for $31. Yes, the bungee cords cost fifty percent more than the actual monitor.Â

When I went to pick up my beautiful new ViewSonic I asked the guy why he was getting rid of it (as if it was unusual to want to get rid of a fifty pound eight year old computer monitor). He raised an eyebrow. "Well, for one, without it my apartment is twice as big." Â Touche, craigslist man. Touche.Â

I wrapped my new baby in blankets and bungee cord and started back. As I left I thought, "The US-UK exchange rate is a joke. I can get fifty-five pounds for twenty bucks." Â Dragging this thing from 80th street in Manhattan to South Slope Brooklyn was exactly as big a pain in the ass as you would think it would be, especially considering I live in a fourth floor walk-up with no elevator. But it was all worth it when I finally plugged it in.

Look at those magnificent bastards. There's nearly a hundred fucking pounds of monitor on that rickety ass IKEA desk. Two mismatched 19" CRTs. My beloved Samsung is now, unbelievably, the smaller monitor. I call these babies Fat Man and Little Boy (too soon?).

Let's look at the overhead view.

Baby got back.Â

You maybe asking yourself, is that a webcam duct-taped to the top of that monitor? You're goddamned right it is!! Â It is Frankensystem. It is alive!!! Â And yes, that is a windowless closet that I have converted into a makeshift eighteen-square-foot office. Â I know what you're thinking: yes, the whole thing IS straight balla.Â

As I type this on my giant new monitor I think, I got a million extra pixels and I got a blog post. Best twenty bucks I ever spent.

The Worst Gambling Move I Ever Made

J-Mac — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 03:07:07 +0000

My last post was about the second worst bet I ever made. Now itâ€™s time to talk about the single worst gambling move I ever made. It took place in an underground NYC poker club.

â€œUndergroundâ€ is an ironic term for these places. Theyâ€™re usually in a converted third floor apartment. I havenâ€™t been to one in years, and I kinda miss it. They were the closest I ever came to feeling like I was in â€œRoundersâ€. The first time I ever went to one, you had to press a buzzer and look into a camera before they let you in. It was just like Mike and Worm walking into the Chesterfield, except instead of Famke Janssen waiting inside the door, there was a gigantic, mean-looking bouncer. He patted us down for weapons, and I mean really patted us down. He got to know me better than a lot of my girlfriends. I can understand it though, I was pretty intimidating, if youâ€™re intimidated by pale, skinny college sophomores. Nevertheless, being checked for weapons before going to gamble late at night at an illicit New York City poker club made me feel like half a badass.

My college poker buddies used to talk about the clubs a lot. There was Play Station, which I never went to, which was supposedly pretty big but you had to know someone to be let in, there was Straddle Club, which became my club of choice but has long since been shuttered or moved to some location unknown to me, and there were a couple others whose names Iâ€™ve forgotten. I probably played in about four or five different ones. They were never around very long. They changed addresses and phone numbers often, got busted by the cops pretty regularly, and got robbed a little less regularly.

Besides the cheap thrill of doing something a little illicit, these clubs were the easiest way for me to play live poker, and even though my total online hands outnumber my total live hands by a hundred to one, I still prefer playing live. I just find it more fun to sit behind felt, shuffle clay chips and drag pots by the armful. Itâ€™s more visceral and tangible to me than numbers on a screen.

Problem is, I usually only went to these clubs after a raucous evening, arriving more often than not in a less than optimal state to gamble effectively. This led to a number of bonehead plays in these clubs: bad bluffs, bad calls, way too loose pre-flop play, etc. But one move stands above the rest, and is indeed the most boneheaded gambling move I have ever pulled.

I had just arrived at the club this particular night and had probably only played about five hands so far. I was sitting at 2/5NL with $500. The table seemed typical for a club like this, which is to say, full of loose, bad players. I was on the button, and I called a raise with A4s along with about three other players. Four or five of us saw a flop of 23J. There was a medium sized bet and two calls so I overcalled hoping to hit my gutter. The turn was a king. The EP PF raiser checked, a thin middle aged blonde lady to his left checked, and the CO, a heavyset man of about thirty, bet about 110 into a pot of 200. For no real reason at all, I decided this was a good pot to try and pick up with some aggression, so I raised it to 300. Maybe I thought I could represent a flopped set or KJ, maybe I thought it was a decent semi-bluff if my Ace outs were also clean, I dunno. It was late, I was more than halfway drunk, and I wanted to bluff.

The PFR folded and then, out of NOWHERE, the thin lady in middle position shoved over the top. The CO folded, and as it was back on me I remembered why it wasnâ€™t a good idea to bluff in big live multiway pots. When I saw it was only 30 more to call the shove, I remembered it was also important to keep stack sizes in mind when you made bets.

Eh, fuck it, I thought, itâ€™s 30 into about a thousand. Maybe Iâ€™ll hit my five. I drunkenly shrugged and called.

The river was another Jack. Oh well. Without waiting for the action to get to me, I said, â€œNice hand. I missed.â€ and tossed my hand into the muck.

At once, the table exploded. â€œWhat the hell are you DOING? Itâ€™s not on you yet! Donâ€™t you know your hand is dead now!â€ they exclaimed.

I was a little surprised by their reaction. â€œRelax guys. I had ace high. She overshoved in a big pot. Sheâ€™s obviously got me.â€ I said.

The CO looked at me with a raised eyebrow and said, â€œDude, she has been doing ridiculous nonsense. All. Night. Long.â€

I turned and looked at the lady. I now saw that she had a confused, faraway look in her eyes. It was the kind of look someone has their first time theyâ€™re a shooter on a craps table, nervous, unsure of themselves, constantly asking, â€œOkay, now what do I do? Was that good or bad? Why do I want to roll a four?â€

â€œWhatâ€™s going on?â€ she asked.

â€œHe mucked his hand. You have the only live hand left, so youâ€™ve automatically won the pot.â€ said the dealer.

Clearly still confused, she turned over her hand. A six and an eight. Eight high. Nothing. No draw, no pair, no nothing.

This time I exploded. â€œEight HIGH?! What the HELL just happened here?!â€

The table was in hysterics as I just stood, slack-jawed, while the dealer pushed a thousand dollar pot to the still befuddled lady. A pot that I had won with ace high, and that I had thrown away with a casual flick of my wrist, for no reason at all.

The lady left the table four hands later. To be fair, that was about a half hour later, because it took about that long for the table to stop laughing at me.

Even now, years later, I will sometimes flick my wrist as if mucking a phantom hold â€™em hand. It is the slightest of gestures, barely noticeable. And I will think to myself, â€œThere it is. A thousand dollars. Poof. Gone.â€

And then Iâ€™ll think to myself, what the hell could she possibly have been thinking? Why call preflop? Why call that flop? Why, in Godâ€™s name why, bluff (?) shove for thirty dollars more with eight high on that turn?

And then Iâ€™ll think, and how on Earth did I possibly find a way to be even dumber than her?

That flick of the wrist remains the worst gambling move I have ever made.

Note: I know Iâ€™m pretty new at the whole blogging thing, but I really kinda like it, but it is hard. Each post ends up twice as long as I thought it would be and takes four times as long to write as I thought it would, which is why I donâ€™t update as often as I like. Nevertheless, it makes it more cool and all the more remarkable when I see Tommy Angelo just nail it and make an awesome blog post in four lines.

The Second Worst Bet I Have Ever Made

J-Mac — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:15:04 +0000

One day I was hanging out in my living room and my roommate walked in and said, â€œMy God, did you know the price of gold is six hundred dollars an ounce?!â€

Now, I lived in South Africa from 1999 to 2002 and gold is a major industry over there. In fact, South African newscasters report the price of gold the way American newscasters report the Dow Jones Industrial Average. They announce it like the weather (â€œItâ€™s twenty-eight degrees in Pretoria and the price of gold is $287 an ounce. Hereâ€™s Jan with sports.â€) And the entire time I lived there the price of gold hovered between $250 and $310 an ounce. I couldnâ€™t believe that gold had more than doubled in price without me hearing about it.

â€œNo way.â€ I said. â€œNo way the price of gold is that high. Itâ€™s probably around $350.â€

My roommate looked at me like I had just said Tetris was a kind of pasta.

Then he asked me, â€œYou want to bet?â€

Obviously he had just looked up the price of gold online twenty seconds ago. Nobody walks into a room and announces the price of gold completely out of nowhere unless they have just that minute learned the stat themselves. For him to be wrong at that moment he would have to have the most bizarrely specific case of Touretteâ€™s of all time, one that compelled its victims to randomly announce incorrect facts, as if they were the worldâ€™s worst Snapple cap.

However, at that moment, he was also implying that I was wrong about a trivial factoid and he was challenging me to defend my knowledge with money.

Few things annoy me more than when somebody says something I believe to be flatly incorrect. One of those more annoying things is when someone says something I believe to be flatly incorrect, then follows it with a smug, condescending comment like, â€œYou want to bet?â€ Another thing is the word, â€œanyhooâ€.

So, at that moment, I felt that I had been challenged, that a gauntlet had been thrown, and even though my brain was fully aware that he was right and I was wrong, my mouth said, â€œFine. Letâ€™s bet.â€

(Also, my girlfriend was in the room at the time. I think I felt duty-bound to accept any challenge presented, no matter how retarded. Thanks, evolution! That instinctâ€™s definitely helpful.)

â€œHow much?â€ my roommate asked.

â€œA hundred bucks,â€ said my mouth. My brain silently screamed that I was an idiotic douchebag.

â€œFine.â€ he said.

We promptly went into his room and walked to his computer, which was obviously open to a website displaying the current price of gold. It was six hundred dollars an ounce. Shocking.

â€œHow about that?â€ I said, trying unsuccessfully to maintain some dignity. I pulled a hundred bucks out of my wallet and handed it over.

The whole event took ninety seconds. As I walked back to the living room I thought to myself, â€œthat has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever done in my life.â€

And it was â€“ at the time.

Little did I know that I could go even dumber. But that story, my friends, is a story for another time.

Later on, when I was thinking about my price of gold bet, I was reminded of a line from Guys and Dolls. â€œSon,â€ one of the characters says, â€œif a man shows you a deck of cards on which the seal has not yet been broken and says that he will bet you that the Jack of Spades will leap out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear, do not bet that man. For if you take that bet, then as sure as you are standing there, you will wind up with an ear full of cider.â€

A wise lesson. To that I would add, â€œif someone randomly announces the price of gold, completely out of nowhere, just fucking believe them.â€

Let me tell you about Phil Ivey

J-Mac — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:13:21 +0000

I think a lot of people, especially when they first start playing poker, have a few poker players they idolize at least a little bit. For some people it might be Sam Farha, the consummate suave gambler with the dangling unlit cigarette. For some it might be Scotty Ngyuen, laughing and knocking back Michelobs, taunting with, â€œYou call, itâ€™s gonna be all over, baby.â€ For some, especially when they were just starting out, it might have been, letâ€™s face it, Phil Hellmuth. Like any competitive field, poker has its stars, its personalities, its celebrities.

But one of the amazing things about poker is that it is actually possible for an average player to sit down and compete with the â€œnamesâ€ of the game. If youâ€™re a basketball fan and worship Kobe Bryant, youâ€™re never going to find yourself D-ing him up on the court, but if you play poker and love Barry Greenstein, you really might find yourself across the table from him in a tournament some day. And even if you did somehow find yourself in a game of one-on-one against Kobe, you wouldnâ€™t stand a ghost of a chance. You wouldnâ€™t even score a point. But if you find yourself in a tournament against Barry Greenstein, it is completely possible that youâ€™ll beat him in a hand. Hell, you can even knock him completely out of the tournament, and take home a signed copy of â€œAce on the Riverâ€ as proof!

The more you move up in stakes, the more likely to are to find yourself competing against the â€œstarsâ€ of poker. As Emil moved up in stakes, I would see and hear about him playing against names that I knew from television, and I was amazed. And thatâ€™s when Emil started finding out that just because someone was on TV doesnâ€™t mean they are any good at poker!

One by one he would sit with someone we both watched on ESPN back in 2003 and he would be shocked at their level of play. One by one he would report back to me: â€œMan, Hellmuth is terrible!â€ â€œMan, Matusow is terrible!â€ â€œMan, so-and-so is terrible!â€

Without exception, the players I knew from TV turned out to be, according to Emil, godawful. He once played a tournament out in L.A. and he sent me a text. â€œThey seated us alphabetically by first name. I made mincemeat out of Eric Lindgren and Eric Seidel!â€

It was actually a little sad and disillusioning, kinda like finding out there was no Santa Claus. I had started playing because I thought the players and the lifeastyle were so cool, and now I learn that theyâ€™re not actually any good. Suddenly I had almost no poker heroes left.

But I did have at least one: Phil Ivey. Every year Norman Chad kept saying how awesome Phil Ivey was, how he was the best, etc. etc. At least I could hope and believe that Phil Ivey actually was the real deal.

Then, in the summer of 2007, Jay and Emil rocketed up to the nosebleeds, and soon enough they were playing 200/400 and 300/600 on Full Tilt against the one and only Phil Ivey.

And they started beating the shit out of him.

I couldnâ€™t believe it. They were up mid-six-figures against him almost immediately. Emil would sit at tables waiting for him, and when Ivey sat in, Emil would walk through the apartment cackling. â€œWe got Ivey!!!â€ He did the same thing whenever some megafish European whale sat against him. I couldnâ€™t believe he viewed Phil Ivey as an opponent the same way he viewed some random rich businessman. I even saved this screenshot, because I just couldnâ€™t believe that anyone, let alone the kid who was my roommate, would want to make sure he could play Ivey more.

(Click for make big)

â€œYouâ€™re excited to play Ivey?â€ I asked. â€œIsnâ€™t he supposed to be awesome?â€

â€œNo, dude!â€ Emil laughed. â€œIveyâ€™s terrible!â€

That was it. I had no heroes left. Apparently everyone in the world is terrible at poker.

I stopped asking about who was good and who wasnâ€™t, because I now knew that everyone was terrible. No point in asking. They kept playing Ivey. I think Ivey ended up winning a bunch back from Jay and Emil, (he might have actually finished up against them, six figures isnâ€™t exactly a huge amount at 200/400 and 300/600, it turns out), but I didnâ€™t really pay close attention. Shortly afterwards, Jay and Emil had a brutal downswing at 500/1000 and stopped playing the nosebleeds for a while.

Years later I read an interview somewhere about how Phil Ivey plays online poker. Someone was saying (it might have been Phil Gordon) that, online, Ivey didnâ€™t really care about the money so much, he just wanted to learn how the online hotshots played their game and defeat them. There was a story of how Ivey sat against some highly feared online limit player with the goal of making the player refuse to play him. Apparently Ivey lost over a million to this online limit player while studying his game, then Ivey won it all back plus more and finally, this highly feared limit player refused to play him anymore. There was a quote in the interview that went something like, â€œIvey will sit in and lose a couple hundred thousand to these kids, just to see what they do and why, and then heâ€™ll win it all back and then some.â€

I thought to myself, â€œWait a minuteâ€¦â€

One day around that time I was hanging out with Emil and some other high stakes players and they were all talking shop: discussing results, opponents, poker news, players. I think Isildur1 might have been the big story at the time, and everyone was talking about durrrr, Antonius, Ivey, everyone involved in the matches. But this time, all these high stakes players had nothing but glowing things to say about Ivey, and Iveyâ€™s game.

Even, to my utter amazement, Emil.

Once again, I couldnâ€™t believe it. But this time, I was incredulous for the completely opposite reason. Two years ago, I couldnâ€™t believe that all these poker players were bad. But this time, after years of hearing how awful everyone apparently really was, I couldnâ€™t believe anyone, anywhere was, according to Emil, actually any good at poker at all, let alone (to judge from the way everyone was talking) really, really good.

By this point there were a steady stream of Ivey stories online. The $16 million drubbing of Andy Beal, games of craps played at stratospheric stakes, effusive testimonials to his skill from every top cash pro, bracelets and bracelet bets wonâ€¦check out the â€œPhil Ivey is the Stone Cold Nutsâ€ thread on 2p2 and you will find some awesome stories (e.g. Ivey is talking to Barry Greenstein about Super Bowl bets. Ivey: I basically broke even, won about 800. Barry: Well, which is it, you broke even, or you won $800,000? Ivey: Whatâ€™s the difference?). Everything seemed to point to Ivey actually being the real deal, the best and coolest goddamn gambler on Planet Earth.

The only lingering doubt I had was what Emil had said about him two years prior.

So on that day, two years later, I asked him again. â€œEmil, so Iveyâ€™s good?â€

Emil must have learned something in those matches against Ivey after I stopped paying attention, because this time Emil said something heâ€™d never said about any player ever before.

â€œIveyâ€™s awesome.â€ Emil grinned, â€œIveyâ€™s the Man.â€

The Good Old Days

J-Mac — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:38:50 +0000

I was reading a thread on 2p2 the other day titled, â€œWhat were the 2+2 forums like in the beginning?â€ I actually avoided the thread for a while because it was in NVG and I assumed it would just be full of dumb jokes and bad information (â€œNVG: Not Very Goodâ€) but when the thread had grown I decided to check it out and it actually had some interesting stories from longtime posters that took me back to what poker and the forums were like in the early and mid 2000s.

Then there was a post from a newer poster who asked, â€œAll you posters with early registration dates who arenâ€™t poker millionaires: what happened?â€

I registered on 2p2 in December 2004. To put that in perspective, thatâ€™s before durrrr registered there. And yet I am not a poker millionaire. So what happened?

A lot of players romanticize the early-to-mid-2000s to an almost mythical degree. They think, â€œman, if I could just go back to those early Party days, pre-UIGEA, I would grind 28 hours a day and stack more cheddar than a Kraft employee with OCD! Iâ€™d be a millionaire!â€ Maybe so. But I have met more than my share of poker millionaires, and Iâ€™d like to share my thoughts about what it seems to take to become one. Even if you started back in the good old days.

In addition to Jay and Emil, Iâ€™ve met a lot of other really successful online players over the years. Longtime high stakes players and posters on 2p2 seem to form a pretty tight-knit community. I think itâ€™s because they are all veterans of a very specialized and unique set of experiences and opportunities and that, in a way, bonds them together. Kinda like the soldiers in Band of Brothers, except instead of reminiscing about fighting the Germans at Bastogne, they share recommendations for high-end sushi places in San Fransisco.

Anyways, my point is, when it comes to observing poker millionaires, I think I have a pretty reasonable sample size. They are a diverse group, but they all seem to have two things in common. Here is what it appears to take to join their ranks:

1. Theyâ€™re smart. Like really, really smart. Have you ever been to a party and started talking to someone and then, while theyâ€™re saying something remarkably insightful on a dense or complicated topic, think to yourself, â€œDamn, this is a smart dude!â€? Well, when THAT guy goes to a party and talks to Phil Galfond or Ariel Schneller, THAT guy says, â€œDamn! these are some really smart fucking dudes!â€

2. Theyâ€™ve worked incredibly hard. The next time you read a â€œwellâ€ post from a sucessful online pro, read it closely. I guarantee that when they describe how they rose through the ranks they will talk about an extended period of time when they were â€œobsessedâ€ with poker. Every single well post Iâ€™ve read mentions a fanatical period early in their career where they had to learn everything they could about the game. Theyâ€™ll describe how they voraciouslty read forums, endlessly talked about hands and line options and opponents and situations with other similarly obsessed players, and ground out thousands and thousands and thousands of hands.

Back when Emil and I used to play at a weekly dormroom game in college, Emil would play a hand, then leap from his chair to play a few hands online at his desk, then run back to the table when the action returned to him. I remember going to his room to try and drag him out to some party sophomore year only to find him somehow 14-tabling on two 17" monitors back in early 2004. Back before I knew him that well, even though there were a lot of guys that played in our dorm game, Emil was the only one who was, â€œthe poker guyâ€, and while I was out flunking music theory, he and flawless_victory and Prevaricator and AZK and two dozen others were figuring out who to three-bet against, when, and why, and it was only after they had worked their games inside and out that they started making graphs with tall green lines that snaked to the top right of the screen on shiny, poker-bought 30" monitors.

So even back then, even in the good old days when a table with an average VPIP of 35% was a bad table, nobody who was just â€œpretty goodâ€, or â€œdecentâ€, or â€œsolidâ€ ended up becoming a millionaire. It still took a smart, talented person who worked their ass off. Sorry guys, in the end, pokerâ€™s just like everything else.

So does that mean the â€œgood old daysâ€ really werenâ€™t as great as people say? HELL no. It really was amazing, a true gold rush. With a minimum of awareness and the mere outline of a thought process (i.e., the way I play poker), you could have a three figure hourly and earn thousands and thousands of dollars.

But not millions.

Millions took a little bit more.

"Beer before poker..."

J-Mac — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:00:24 +0000

If youâ€™ve been to college, or are just a devoted follower of fraternity wisdom, youâ€™ve probably heard the saying, â€œBeer before liquor, never been sickerâ€. Early on in my collegiate poker career, I coined a saying of my own: â€œBeer before poker, never been broker.â€

Which is a shame, because gambling and alcohol are vices which go together so comfortably, like marijuana and White Castle cheeseburgers. Most of my best memories of Vegas arenâ€™t actually memories at all. They start with a cocktail before dinner, then thereâ€™s a flash where Iâ€™m sitting at a poker table in the bowels of some dirty casino, and then nothing until I remember staggering out the next morning with a rumpled dress shirt and a dazed expression as the blistering Vegas sun beats down like the vengeful eye of an angry God.

Good times.

I used to love going out drinking with friends in college, then sneaking away at the end of the night to go to an underground NYC poker club and playing, hammered, until dawn. For some reason, drunk John thinks he is excellent at getting people to fold to his big bluffs. Also, drunk John thinks people in underground NYC poker clubs fold, ever. He is wrong on both counts. So most of these late night excursions ended badly for our intrepid hero.

Hence the adage, â€œbeer before pokerâ€¦â€

Yet after years of consistently negative feedback, I still frequently found myself on Full Tilt late at night, inebriated and playing 60/55/5 and being stunned at the calldowns opponents would make. (â€œSure, two pair is good THIS time, but FYI I could have EASILY had a runner runner straight there, rounders6969, if that IS your real name!â€).

Eventually I instinctively settled on a compromise where I would play much lower stakes if I logged in drunk. It wasnâ€™t as thrilling when I won, but, well, I didnâ€™t win often anyway. This low stakes rule became a sane policy that I never wavered from.

Except one night, I was in the midst of a hellish downswing that had been mutilating my 6k 200NL bankroll and sent me through that most hated practice of the poker player, moving down to lower stakes. (Shudder) Oh the continued shame of playing pots half as big and winning money half as quickly as you know you would be winning in a just and merciful Universe, the Universe you were living in back when you were winning at higher stakes!

So that night, after being out drinking and lamenting my luck to be in this UNjust and indifferent Universe in which we all find ourselves, I was back in the apartment and opened up Tilt and Stars to see just how far I had fallen from my 6k baseline. I was disheartened by what I found. Pokerstars had around $1,600. Full Tilt had a lousy six hundred bucks.

Fuck it, I decided. To hell with my â€œpenny-ante poker while drinkingâ€ rule. I am going to play until both of these accounts are at the next thousand-dollar mark, or bust them both trying. I fired up two tables of 600NL.

And that is the last thing I remember.

I awoke the next morning, still fully dressed and lying on top of my covers. In waves, the events of the previous night returned to me, culminating in my gambling decision fueled by alcohol and rage, (which is on the short list for the worst kind of decision you can make). Shitshitshitshitshit. I nervously crawled to my computer and checked my balances.

Pokerstars: $2,033.68
Full Tilt: $1,089.10

Success. Against all odds and logic, success. I couldnâ€™t believe it.

At first I was just incredibly relieved. But after it sunk in that I had just had my best day in a month while blackout drunk, I felt like King Gangster Pimp the Awesome. I even had to coin a new phrase:

Drinking and winning is the best kind of sinning.