The Poker Moth

*edit* – Not long after I posted this review, Betfair fixed a few things. Including the HH issue. Read the update here

Well, as mentioned earlier, I’ve been dabbling with Betfair again, and it seems to have improved somewhat. Of course, it would take a concerted effort from a large team of developers to have made Betfair Poker any worse, so that wasn’t a particularly informative opening sentence. Just how improved is it, then? And perhaps you’d like to know a load of tedious (and quite possibly spurious) details about the history of Betfair Poker? Of course!

Back in “the day”, the nascent Betfair decided they needed a poker site, presumably because they weren’t making enough money from their phenomenally successful (and excellent) exchange betting operations. So! They did what people always do in these situations, which is to run a skin of an existing poker network. They plumped for Cryptologic, which is a fine bit of software, and also home to William Hill, Littlewoods, and a smattering of dedicated poker firms. And this was a very good thing, for when you bring the punters of one of the biggest high street bookies in the world (Will Hill) together with the punters of one of the biggest online bookies in the world, you get A LOT OF FISH. Seriously, loads. Thousands of them, everywhere, at all levels. It was beautiful, man.

It was also where I cut my teeth as a poker player. I grew up on those tables, and I have the same nostalgia for those halcyon Betfair-on-Crypto days that I would probably have had for my childhood, if my childhood hadn’t been so unremittingly bleak, or blighted by psychotic nuns, or largely located in the fecking 1980s… anyway, I digress. SO. Imagine my disappointment when Betfair announced that they were sick of paying their dues to Crypto, and were consequently developing their own network. “The greedy buggers”, I thought to myself, but I had no idea of the damage that Betfair were preparing to wreak on my cosy online poker life.

You see (and I should stress that the following is largely based on things I have read on the internet, and should therefore be treated with a degree of scepticism) Betfair weren’t developing their own software at all. What they actually did was buy the software of an obscure, failed poker network, rebrand it, and pass it off as their own. And there’s only one phrase that can adequately describe that software – fucking terrible. Alright, there are other phrases too; mindblowingly awful sums it up quite well, as does who the hell approved this buggy joke? and I’ve shat better poker software than that. You get the idea.

“But what was actually wrong with it”, you’re probably asking. That’s a question that could literally take weeks to answer, but I’ll restrict myself to the three main issues with the original release. In no particular order -

1. It had a gimmick, which was being all resizable and customisable and stuff. The client allowed you to open loads of tables, which could either be popped as separate windows or attached to your existing tables, and resized to your hearts content. Two problems here; firstly, the whole floating/anchored tables concept was ineptly implemented (with a horrible set of menus which are sadly still in place), but secondly, and this is pretty incredible – although the tables were resizable, the fonts weren’t. Honestly. So when you resized the table (and this would usually be by accident, because you wouldn’t do it on purpose a second time after you’d seen the results), all the player names, bet sizes, tournament information…. everything… were completely illegible. Even when you tried to return the table to it’s original size. And if you returned to the lobbies after resizing a screen… you couldn’t read those either. Brilliant.

2. That wasn’t the only problem with the lobbies, of course. For some reason, the developers thought it was highly important that when you clicked on a table, you could see a little map of where the other players on the table were located. (I don’t think this even worked properly, but I obviously didn’t care enough to check. I may also have imagined this bit). Sadly, they didn’t think it necessary to allow you to sort the lobbies by limit, buy-in, number of players, etc, meaning that navigating the lobbies was an absolute nightmare, assuming you could read the damn things in the first place.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you let Noomeedja people loose on something that isn’t pop-up advertising.

3. No hand history support. Anywhere. None.

And so, following a great deal of hoo-hah and fanfare and sundry rigmarole (including a promotional email every bloody day for about a month), the New Betfair service launched, and everyone took one look at it and thought “you must be bloody joking”, and stayed on Crypto. Everyone except the fish, that is. Most of the fish left, and Crypto was never quite the same, and Betfair, while fishy, was so horrendously unusable that all the dead money that went with it may as well have been actually, factually dead, for all the use they were.

That was (guesstimate) eighteen months ago, ish. Since then, I’ve occasionally opened the client to see if they’ve improved things any, but it’s only recently that there’s been any sign of an attempt to make the site usable, and it’s only in the last week or so that they’ve solved the fonts issue to my satisfaction. Hooray!

So, what we have now is a tolerably functional, low-traffic poker network. It’s still broken in many ways (more on that in a minute), but it’s now possible to highlight some of its strengths without choking on the neverending list of reasons why it was completely unusable. For instance, the generic MTT structure is probably the best around, at 2000 chips/15 minute levels and a fairly standard blind progression. It even avoids that nasty spike when the antes come out that blights the (otherwise lovely) Stars structure, and although the guaranteed prize pool MTTs on Stars start you with more chips (3000 to Betfair’s 2000), Betfair wins overall. PLUS! As the traffic’s fairly low, the fields are much smaller (typically about 100 players for a late evening 5.50 MTT), which I believe is a good thing, YMMV.

Incidentally, you didn’t read that previous paragraph. It never happened. You ain’t seen me, right, and stay the hell away from my fishy Betfair tourneys.

What else is good?

*pause*

Well, it seems a lot more civil than your standard poker site, although I haven’t been playing there long enough to form an accurate judgment on that. Otherwise… I’m struggling. It’s not so much that Betfair does more things well, now, it just does less things incredibly badly. And while this is commendable, it’s also a bit dull, so let’s get back to the bad stuff.

First gripe – the action buttons. First of all, the pre-clickers don’t always work properly, and indeed don’t even appear on certain hands. I can live with that. What’s particularly irritating is their positioning: the pre-click fold button shares a fair amount of space with the call button, which has caused me to misclick on three separate occasions in the last week (although the only one which had a serious effect on a game came when I accidentally called a huge preflop raise from the button and flopped two pair to crack his nines and send him out. On the bubble. Shouldn’t complain, really).

But the big flaw with Betfair, even today, is with the hand histories. Maybe someone at Betfair is obsessed with the idea of offering the worst poker software in the world. Maybe they have an award for just that achievement, and they’re trying to hang onto it. Maybe they’re all too coked out of their nut in Hammersmith bars to care. These are all viable explanations for the existence of Betfair Poker Buddy. Here’s another one – maybe there’s a weird, cosmic force of uselessness that surrounds the Betfair offices, and they need to channel it into something before it lays waste to most of West London. (This theory bears some similarities to my explanation for the continued employment of Colin Murray, incidentally).

Betfair Poker Buddy, in case you’re wondering, is Betfair’s solution to their inability to show hand histories within the BF poker client. It’s an entirely separate client, and it’s so shit that it makes the original release of New Betfair look like a masterpiece of software design. Bear in mind that all this thing has to do is read a text file off your hard drive, and then show it to you. It does this by locking up your computer for what seems like several hours while it painstakingly processes all that hugely complex information, and then presents it to you in the weirdest, most cackhanded way imaginable. I’m going to struggle to explain this one properly. Hang on a minute…

OK. You have the BPB window. Once you’ve commanded BPB to import your histories, it displays them in a tree view, similar to that used in Windows Explorer. Each individual hand history is listed by a title with various generic info about the hand, with an “expand” button next to it. Clicking on said button reveals the history for that particular hand.

Well. Most of it.

Because the hand histories are quite long, the full thing usually won’t fit on the page. (Not even on my 1600×1200 monitor). No problem, we’ll just use the scrollbar, right? Wrong. The scrollbar scrolls you through the individual hand titles, but not the hand histories themselves, so if you scroll, you’ll scroll to the next hand in the list. In order to see the nether regions of the individual hand histories (i.e. all the interesting bits, like who mucked what), you have to hover the mouse over the text, which will then reveal the whole thing in a pop-up window. For four seconds. And, of course, it’s incredibly slow, and a massive resource hog. You wouldn’t want something as complicated as a hand history browser to be quick and efficient, would you?

I’m a bit of a whore for mucked hand info. I don’t always have a HH browser open when I play, but I like to have one available so I can see what was mucked if needs be. Sadly, BPB is so horribly broken that I refuse to have it open on my desktop (I nearly uninstalled it on principle, in fact), but despite this, Betfair is currently my preferred site for tournament play. That’s how bad the standard of play is: as long as I can see the cards, stack sizes and bet amounts (which hasn’t always been a given with BP), I’m going to swim in this pool, rather than the much better designed ones in the surrounding area.

*staggers back to blog, coughing profusely*

Bleurrrgh. Most of the last four days has been spent either having fun or recovering from having fun, hence no updates. I’ll do a proper post later; for now, a quick update on my intermittent poking over the last few days…

…which has seen me about break-even. I went fairly deep in the Stars 20k the other night, finishing 40th (my best result in that tournament this month, which isn’t much cop) after going card dead in the fourth hour. It’s always irritating to invest that much time into a tourney, only to crash out just as the money gets interesting.

In happier news, I’ve returned to Betfair Poker, which is now *almost* usable, a mere 18 months after their relaunch. Betfair’s defection from the Cryptologic network was a very sad day, so it’s nice to finally reacquaint myself with their users, and I’m happy to report that they’re as awful as ever. Maybe worse. I’ll probably write some more on New, Working Betfair later.

I’ve not played any dark poker since Thursday, though. I want to sit down and have a good look through that Annette_15 hand history before I commit any more dollars to the dark side. Still messing about with the tech to try and find ways to do video, too. ALL IN GOOD TIME, MY FRIENDS.

It seems I have to go out and have lots of fun tonight, so the anticipated update on my Dark Arts Adventure will have to wait a while.  All I can say for now is that I  had a crack at a $1.10  STT  on Stars last night, finished 6th, knocked one player out, and found it to be fascinating and hilarious and weird and highly informative and scary and unsettling and great.

And there’s going to be a couple of players on Stars who have notes on me which read “absolutely demented”.

More tomorrow!

What’s that? You’ve not heard of her?

Ms. Obrestad first came to my attention when I heard Daniel Negreanu talking about her, in awed tones, on High Stakes Poker. What I heard astonished me. This is (roughly) what he said -

“Did you hear about that girl who won the WSOPE? Apparently she’s been winning tournaments online without looking at her hole cards. No, seriously. Completely dark. Just playing purely position, I guess. Only 18 years old. Probably sticks a post-it note on the monitor”.

She started playing online when she was 15, built her bankroll entirely from freerolls, and three years later she’d won the inaugaural WSOP Europe event for $2,000,000, making her the youngest ever winner of a WSOP bracelet (it was also the biggest prize ever won by a woman in WSOP history), and she has a sideline in mindblowingly cool party tricks. I am awestruck. But perhaps not so awestruck that I can’t rip her idea off.

I’m keen to do this for a few reasons; firstly, and most importantly, it will be hugely educational. Secondly, I think I can set it up in such a way that I can blank my cards out without sticking stuff on my monitor, and then record it for the world to see, and thirdly, it’s just so incredibly cool and awesome and wow.

However, if I’m going to play dark, I’m not going in blind. My first attempt will be for play money, and then once I’ve got a feel for it, I’m going to take on a freeroll MTT. We’ll see how that works out before I try playing dark for cash, and I may never get that far; it’s kinda presumptuous of me to think that I have the skills to pull something like this off at all, frankly. We’ll soon find out, and it’ll certainly be interesting.

More news on this to follow. I’m off to have a crack at a playmoney SNG, and test the recording software out…

*edit*

OK. So, before I discuss my own attempt, back to Annette’s win. It was, believe it or not, a $4.40/180 SNG on Stars that she won – my very own bread and butter tournament. And, while there’s no video of this feat, she posted the hand history up to PokerXFactor (a rather nice hand history replayer site, among other things). You can view the game here – linky linky – but you’ll have to register with the site first.

Any doubts about the veracity of her claims are dispelled on the fourth hand of the tournament, where she folds KK under the gun. It’s really weird to see; it just looks so wrong.

One other thing to note – she claims that she looked at her cards once, when an opponent had pushed all-in at her. I’m guessing that’s very late in the tournament (I’ve only watched a quarter of it so far). One peek in 343 hands is pretty good going, though.

As for my own experiment… well, I’ve quickly realised that, just like non-dark poker, play money is completely pointless for anything other than acclimatizing to the table conditions. Briefly, I entered a 45 player NLHE SNG (for 300+20 play chips, if you care… incidentally, why do they rake these?), did nothing on the first orbit, then limped (WEAK) on the button in a multiway pot on the second orbit. The flop came down 778 with two spades, and the player in second last position minbet at it. Looked like a good spot to me, and I raised the pot, and only the minbetter called. She was shortstacked anyway, so I ended up shoving my chips in after a jack and a second 8 came on 4th and 5th street, with no help for the flush draw. She had the 7, and that was half my stack gone. No real complaints about that.

It was the second confrontation that reminded me why play money games aren’t the best environment for making moves. Again, I limped from the button, pushed the K94 rainbow flop after it was checked to me, and was called by… 62 offsuit! Who then hit his deuce on the turn and knocked me out. (I had Q8, apparently). He hadn’t even seen my apparently mental play with ten high earlier: I’d been moved to a different table immediately afterwards. He just thought he’d call me with six high and no draw. And I don’t think the pot odds had much to do with it.

So, two things are apparent. One: This isn’t going to work at play money, I either put my money where my mouth is or give it a miss. $1.10 STTs look like being the best place to practice. Two: I need to study that Annette_15 hand history file, and learn from the master.

More on this tomorrow, probably. I’m going to have another stab at the $20k now. *update* unsuccessful; played really well for an hour, then stacked off with TT against a player who my notes said I should not call under any circumstances. Especially not when he’s holding KK, obv. An extremely foolish and totally avoidable mistake, but that stupid blowup aside, it seems like my study of the dark arts is having some interesting positive effects on my positional play. We’ll see how it develops.

Well, I was watching Chelsea v Everton, and had a quick look through the Team Pokerstars list to see if anyone interesting was playing on Pokerstars. The only TP player online at that time was Daniel Negreanu. I’d watched a bit of a $5000 heads up match he was involved in earlier, and assumed he’d be playing something similarly high-stakes. But no – he was playing in an $8.80 MTT!

There’s almost always chat-box carnage when Negreanu plays on Stars. The railbirds witter away, posting hundreds of witless questions every second. This only gets worse when he plays low-stakes games, though, because observer chat is only available to players who have the amount of the tournament buy-in in their account. So in a $5000 match, the chat box is deadly silent. In an $8.80 game, it scrolls so fast it should carry an epilepsy warning.

I hadn’t been watching long before he was knocked out; the chips went in on a J high flop, Negreanu had QJ, his opponent had KJ, and that was that, to the immense relief of the other players at the table. I closed the table down and looked at the MTT lobby to see if Negreanu was going to continue his low-stakes adventure, and whaddyaknow? He’s in a $2.50 MTT starting at 10pm!

So I’m in too. There’s currently 2050 entrants, so the chances of me being on the same table as him are minimal and I’m highly unlikely to add him to my list* of Team Pokerstars scalps. I’ll settle for outlasting him.

I’ll update this post as the tournament progresses.

*Well, I say “list”. There’s only one name on it, and I took less than the $2.50 buy-in for this tournament off him. BUT IT STILL COUNTS!

—————————————–

10.02pm.: We’re off. 2938 runners. I get pocket queens in my first big blind, and am aghast when the SB raises 12xBB at the three limpers. I think about it, decide I’m likely ahead, push, and he folds. I now have 1810 chips, Negreanu still has 1500.

10.10pm: I get AKo, make a weak 3xBB raise against an early limper, and get called by the limper and both blinds. They all call my c-bet on the 567 flop, and two players are all-in by the time the action gets to me after a 4 comes on the turn. The limper had A8, the big blind 82s. I still have DN well covered, though; 1610 to 1140.

10.20pm: It’s proving quite tricky to watch my table, Negreanu’s table, and post these updates. After 20 minutes we’re down to 2210 players. Negreanu gets involved in a multiway limped pot from the SB on a T82 flop, the chips go in against the big blind on the turn, and he doubles up with T8 versus his opponent’s QT. Meanwhile, I’d lost a few chips through smallball limps, but then take on a bluffy type with my KJ on a AKrag flop with two clubs. I call his bet on the flop, check check on the blank turn, and I call his half-pot bluff on the end (with 97c) to take it down. I now have 1905, Negreanu has 2370.

10.36pm: Negreanu opens it up for 5xBB (25/50) from mid/late position. The BB calls him, then fires a 350 probe bet on the Q-rag-rag flop. I’m very surprised to see Negreanu fold; I had assumed he was value betting a huge hand, as he’s so likely to be called by people who want to bust him. Apparently not. Meanwhile, I drop a few chips with AQo, and then get moved to another table immediately after getting some great reads on several of my old opponents. Thanks, Pokerstars. Currently on 1610 chips, DN has 2200, and there are only 1639 players left.

10.44pm: I’m out! Limped in on my new table with QT of clubs, and was minraised by the seat behind me. Three players see the 893 flop, with two clubs, giving me a big fat draw – somewhere between 12 and 18 outs. I check, the raiser bets half the pot, the shortstack in the big blind calls, and I push. Both players call, with the minraiser showing aces (which was about what I expected), while the big blind had 87 of hearts. Even against aces, I was the favourite for the main pot; according to the odds calcumalator, I was 48.84% to win, with the aces 38.1% and the 87s drawing at a 13.07% chance. Heads up against the aces for the side pot, I was a 52/48 underdog.

Obviously, I missed my draw. I’ll have to wait for another opportunity to add Kid Poker to my “list”. *shakes fist*

Another shot at the $20k on Stars ends with me busting out in 250-somethingth with QQ v 44. With the exception of a crazy few minutes, I played excellent poker throughout, despite experiencing some low-level tilt thanks to a suckout-filled day. The first hour was great; I chipped up early on after getting my AA in preflop vs KK and 33 (yes, really, 33), and worked my stack well to keep among the chipleaders, but everything ground to a halt after the first break when I was moved to a table which was mostly comprised of smart, aggressive players who refused to lose. Seven of the eight opponents who I started playing with with were still there almost two hours later, and the blinds had moved from 75/150 to 1000/2000/100 with virtually no change in the number of chips at the table. And I was phenomenally card dead for the entire period. And while everyone to my right was playing solid aggressive poker, the two to my left were the weakest, tightest players on the planet, which meant that I barely get to see an unraised pot in late position for the duration. I couldn’t imagine a worse table.

I survived by defending my blind very aggressively, and the only two big pots I won were with 64 suited and 62 offsuit, both times by calling raises from the aggro squad and then check-pushing the unhelpful flop . That can often lead to disaster, but it was about the only option available to me; if it could have been avoided, it would have been. Despite my kamikaze blind defence, I still ended up getting whittled away, and when I finally caught a playable hand (ATs) in the BB towards the end of the third hour I decided to shove against the inevitable raise, even though I was fairly sure I was behind. (This is the bit which wasn’t excellent poker). I was fucked off, frankly, and had decided it was time to double up or go to bed. I was right, I was behind; AQs held up and I was left with less than a big blind in my stack.

I managed to triple up with 93 on the next hand, though, and a couple of judicious pushes later, I was back in the running, and better still, I finally got moved off the HELL TABLE. The relief was reinforced when I picked up pocket queens in my first big blind in my new seat, and doubled through some joker who tried to steal with 42 offsuit. This got me safely through the bubble, and into the third break, which is when the vaguely funny bit happened:

THE VAGUELY FUNNY BIT

Last hand of the hour, and a guy with less than an ante pushes from UTG. Another player calls from early position, one more calls from the button, and the BB pushes all-in for about 5 big blinds. Both limpers call.

The flop comes king-rag-rag, the first limper bets out, the button folds, and we see the cards. The limper has KQ, the big blind AT, but the turn and river bring a Q and a J to give the BB a straight, and the other guy starts in with the mouthy stuff. “This fucking site, how can this shit happen all day long, rigged Jokerstars bullshit”… etc. And being bored, I type “AT v KQ, all-in preflop, it’s a seven card game, get a grip”, and go off to make some coffee.

When I come back, there’s a ton of abuse from Mr. KQ aimed at me. His last comment is “Ah, you’re from London, no wonder you’re such a donkey”. To which Mr. AT replied -

“No, I’m from New Jersey, same as you. Geometry obviously isn’t your strong point”.

—————————————–

Look, it’s been a rough day, alright? I’d probably find a BBC Three comedy show funny right now.

(In good news, my losses on the tables were offset by some astute bets on the football, so I’m actually slightly up on the day financially. This has to be weighed against the numerous hours of teeth-grinding poker frustration, sadly).

I played three $4.40/180 SNGs yesterday, with mixed results. In the first game, I was completely card-dead throughout; the only decent hand to come my way was pocket kings, and I couldn’t get any action with them. Happily, I won the second tournament, taking the chip lead in the first hour and floating my way through to the final table, where a few fortuitous events (most notably a JJ v QQ v AA confrontation when five-handed that was won by the chipleader’s fishhooks) saw me through to the final three, and my short-handed FT skills bagged another win.

And then there was the third attempt, where I hit sets with pocket sevens twice in the first blind level, and had amassed a stack of 8k by the time the blinds hit 25/50. Having just won a tournament thanks to being patient when sitting on a huge M, you’d think I would have adopted a similar approach in a very similar situation… but no! I went all laggy instead, trying to outplay everybody, checkraising flops for fun, and so on. Oh, you’ll never guess how it all turned out…

…well, actually, it went pretty well for a while. Up until the first break, in fact, but my failure to adjust my play to take the tightening up of the table into account proved to be my downfall. The best example was limping K7s on the button, and raising an early player on the 7-high rainbow flop. He called, and the thought that I might be behind never even crossed my mind. I have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to sets in that kind of spot, but that’s no excuse here; he was playing A7o, and I cleverly put him all in on the raggy turn with three outs to sweat on. Not smart.

Part of the problem here is that I have so little respect for my opponents at this level that I’m prone to plays like that, and to be honest, it’s not a massively -EV play against a random $4.40/180 opponent. I had him well covered, and I’m likely enough to get paid off by x7-suited, straight draws and low unimproved pairs to make the play almost-marginal. But not slowing down after my flopraise was called, in a spot like that… I’ve made worse plays, but that sort of glib attitude doesn’t win tournaments. All it took was a couple of strong second-best hands in the following ten minutes or so, and I was on the rail.

On the one hand, I had a pretty good day, all things considered. On the other, it should have been much better, and that’s incredibly frustrating. I have an unfortunate tendency to use tournament wins (even small ones) as an excuse to set fire to my money for a few days afterwards, and that’s a leak in my game that needs serious plugging. Another is my predilection for messing about when I have too many chips. Enough of that, already.

Last week’s PAD has just been uploaded to Pokertube, and while you wouldn’t call it a classic, as such, it’s a great little tournament. As ever, there’s a theme; last week was “Heckler’s Week”, which translates into “Loudmouth Week”; Gavin Smith (fresh from winning the previous week’s show while pissed out of his face), Sam Grizzle, Jean-Robert Bellande, Mike Matusow, Sean Sheikhan, and Phil Hellmuth. It’s a lot of fun, and ends in a very silly heads up battle which is well worth seeing.

Season 3 Episode 13 Part 1
Season 3 index

Sadly, only on a $25 table, and he just doubled someone else up on the previous hand, so he only started with $1.20. But I felted Elky!

PokerStars Game #14692867465: Hold’em No Limit ($0.10/$0.25) – 2008/01/20 – 10:50:12 (ET)
Table ‘Pompeja V’ 6-max Seat #6 is the button
Seat 1: Andy.l.12 ($43.75 in chips)
Seat 2: Gin777 ($25 in chips)
Seat 3: Guihierba ($20.40 in chips)
Seat 4: ceddu57 ($66 in chips)
Seat 5: ElkY ($1.20 in chips)
Seat 6: dermoth ($25.65 in chips)
Andy.l.12: posts small blind $0.10
Gin777: posts big blind $0.25
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to dermoth [As Jd]
Guihierba: folds
ceddu57: folds
ElkY: raises $0.95 to $1.20 and is all-in
dermoth : raises $2.30 to $3.50
Andy.l.12: calls $3.40
ceddu57 said, “8 8″
ceddu57 said, “oui”
Gin777: calls $3.25
*** FLOP *** [5d 6c 5c]
Andy.l.12: checks
Gin777: checks
dermoth : checks
*** TURN *** [5d 6c 5c] [Td]
Andy.l.12: checks
Gin777: checks
dermoth : checks
*** RIVER *** [5d 6c 5c Td] [Jc]
Andy.l.12: checks
Gin777: bets $5.25
dermoth : calls $5.25
Andy.l.12: folds
*** SHOW DOWN ***
Gin777: shows [9s Qd] (a pair of Fives)
Dermoth : shows [As Jd] (two pair, Jacks and Fives)
Dermoth collected $16.55 from side pot
ElkY: mucks hand
ceddu57 said, “près du watrin rue st mihiel”
dermoth collected $4.60 from main pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $22.20 Main pot $4.60. Side pot $16.55. | Rake $1.05
Board [5d 6c 5c Td Jc]
Seat 1: Andy.l.12 (small blind) folded on the River
Seat 2: Gin777 (big blind) showed [9s Qd] and lost with a pair of Fives
Seat 3: Guihierba folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 4: ceddu57 folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 5: ElkY mucked [Ac Ts]
Seat 6: dermoth (button) showed [As Jd] and won ($21.15) with two pair, Jacks and Fives

Some rather fortunate events on the river there, and I’m not proud of that call, but I was hoping my kicker would play. I hadn’t read it for a sidepot-sized bluff with Q high, I’ll admit.

Anyway. I felted Elky.

High Stakes Poker High Stakes Poker High Stakes Poker. All you ever hear (on this blog, at least) is High Stakes Poker. So I thought I should pay some credit to the only other really good poker show on the planet. BBC2’s Food Poker!

Alright, no. Let us instead celebrate NBC’s Poker After Dark (as Food Poker’s rubbish, and inexplicably not on Pokertube). PAD’s format is pretty simple, and there’s no cooking involved; six players buy-in for $20k and play a winner-takes-all SNG. This is shown in five programmes every weeknight. And why is it great?

It’s great because of Oliver “Ali” Nejad, the king of poker commentary. Shhh! Can you hear him?

…

No. Because Nejad isn’t saying anything. He’s waiting until he sees something worth commentating on. He’s not telling you what the players at the table are saying, because he knows that if he keeps his mouth shut, you’ll be able to hear them for yourself. He’s not riffing his way through one of his favourite tortured poker analogies for the thousandth time. He’s certainly not trying to make you laugh. And he’s not a celebrity DJ who’s stumbled into the studio by accident and is now attempting to pass his cluelessness off as an endearing character flaw. He’s Oliver Nejad, and he’s going to keep his mouth shut until he has something worth saying. He’s a legend, is what I’m saying.

Nejad’s so good, it doesn’t even matter that he has a fairly annoying voice. You rarely hear it. I sometimes get the impression that he’s busy doing something else at the same time; reading a really good book, perhaps, or playing poker online. Every now and then, he looks up and says “Doyle’s raised it up with an inside straight draw”, and he’s done for another five minutes.

Meanwhile, the players natter away, and the action unfolds at it’s own pace. The show’s five-episodes-a-week format provides plenty of room for the action to develop, and although it’s not as sedentary as High Stakes Poker (where three hands can take up an entire episode), the end product is… well, soothing. Poker happens, and Nejad lets it.

I’m a fan, basically.

Season One
Season Two
Season Three