The Poker Moth

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.

Ever read Alan N Schoonmaker’s Psychology Of Poker? No? You should, it’s excellent. Schoonmaker’s shtick is to outline four different types of poker player, (Loose Aggressive, Loose Passive, Tight Passive and Tight Aggressive), explain why they play the way they do, and then explain how the reader can change their playing style to the One True Style, the tight aggressive ideal, assuming they’re not TAG already. It’s a fascinating read, and particularly good for players who are just starting out.

Of course, there’s more to poker psychology than betting patterns. You can classify poker players into various categories, but the problem is that making glib generalisations about your opponents based on certain aspects of their behaviour can be a risky business. However, there’s one group of players who can be psychoanalysed and pigeonholed relatively safely, and that’s the table expert. I’ve been studying these loudmouthed feckers for some considerable time now, and I’ve come to some solid conclusions, which I’m very generously going to share with you, the non-existent readers of my blog.

First up – a quick definition. Table experts are the people who volunteer opinions on how others have played their hands. They’ll usually be criticising the “worst” player at the table. Play online, at any level, for more than an hour or two and you’re all but guaranteed to run into at least one, if not several. And when you encounter one, you can draw some immediate conclusions about them.

1. They lose money.

2. They’ve read a book. Sometimes more than one.

3. They’ll play predictable ABC poker before the flop. They’re completely hopeless postflop.

4. They’re very, very prone to tilt.

You see, the reason why the table expert behaves the way he (female table experts are rare) does is because they believe they should be winning money. They’ve read a book, see? They know what hands you’re allowed to play, and what hands are STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, they don’t win money. They lose it. And it makes them angry and bitter.

Most normal poker players realise that when someone’s playing badly, the last thing you should do is announce, as loudly as possible, “LOOK! LOOK! THAT PERSON IS PLAYING BADLY!”. This is because most normal poker players would rather their opponents played badly, as that improves the chances that you’ll win their money. Seems obvious, yes?

However, table experts have other priorities. They’ve read a book, they’ve memorised a chart of starting hand requirements, and yet they’re still losing money. To the table expert, this is inexplicable; they cannot for the life of them understand why they’re not living on a beach in Costa Rica surrounded by coke and hookers. They will quickly arrive at one or both of the following conclusions.

1. Online poker is rigged.

2. They’re losing because there are too many players who aren’t playing properly.

And bearing the above in mind, they quickly realise that it’s not their fault that they’re losing, and before long their dreams of a Costa Rican cokewhore lifestyle are replaced by an entirely different objective; to demonstrate how much they know about the game by telling everyone else how badly they’re playing, which somehow makes the table expert feel better about the dollars these “bad” players are taking from him.

*pauses, reads previous paragraphs back*

Hmm, hardly an objective psychological appraisal, is it? But you get the gist, and while the above may read like a horribly subjective rant (alright, IS a horribly subjective rant), it’s backed up by research. For several months, I’ve looked up every table expert I’ve come across on OPR. I haven’t been keeping a tally (I’ve got enough stuff open on my underpowered computer when I’m playing without adding a bloody spreadsheet to the mix), but I’d estimate that a bare minimum of 95% of the experts I OPR’d were losers. Most of them heavy losers.

And, of course, I talk to them. This always starts off with me politely requesting that they stop playing Teacher, and usually descends into an argument. (Table experts don’t take well to people challenging their authority, and while I happily admit to being an overbearing arrogant sod, I’m always careful to be ever-so-polite when I’m talking to these fools. It’s very rare that I’ll get a polite response, though). And whenever I can get the table expert to rise above gratuitous cackhanded insults, they almost always reveal themselves to be bitter losers who genuinely believe that their losses are someone else’s fault.

How can you take advantage of this? Well, as mentioned above, table experts are almost always tight preflop, and generally incapable of laying down a strong hand postflop. Implied odds for draws go through the roof against table experts, who seem to view flush chasing as being morally equivalent to ritualized Satanic child abuse, and love to call a flushed board so they can get that satisfying rush of indignation, mingled with the bonus high of knowing they were right all along; if it weren’t for the fish, they’d be winners, but it’s all rigged anyway, so who cares?!

In short, these people are poker’s answer to Daily Mail readers; they want to be outraged, and they’re happy to pay money for the privilege. Don’t disappoint them!