Hugo's Blogspotting: 3 January

Pistols at Dawn!

There’s nothing like a good spat to start the year off so look no further than Biggerdeal.com where Grub Smith and Patrick Marber have reached the “gloves off” stage.

Many years ago, long before the poker boom, Marber wrote an excellent play set around a poker game called Dealer’s Choice. It has recently been revived with much success so Grub Smith being the keen poker player/journalist that he is not only went along to see the play, but was also asked to conduct an interview with Marber himself.

Seeing as he has a blog at Biggerdeal.com Grub wrote an entry concerning their meeting which revealed some sort of history between himself and Marber. It appears that Smith remembers being blanked by Patrick at some cocktail party and that Patrick also once went on a date with a girl that Smith had set his sights on.

What’s all this got to do with poker I hear you ask? Well, somehow Smith has transformed his past grievances into unnecessary nitpicking about the poker content of the play.

He goes into detail about a hand in the play where two players flop a straight on a flop of J T 7 with two spades. One character, Mugsy, agonises over the fact that his opponent, Ash, could be freerolling on him with the 8s 9s, but still makes the call. Both characters now turn their cards over and Mugsy sees that Ash has what he was dreading, 8s 9s. No spade comes and Mugsy’s relief is cut short when Ash points to the paired board at the end and reveals a full house.

So is Smith right to quibble? Marber has left a reply in the comments section:

“But you saw the play? Did you not observe how many cards each player held in this hand? To refresh your memory it was four. Might this not have indicated something to you? I mean, it’s got to be a clue, hasn’t it? I’m shocked that such a keen poker scribe as yourself could’ve missed it? Or was your professional judgement distracted/clouded/murked with paranoid imaginings of cocktail party blankings and ancient furtive fumblings in North London tea shops?

You might by now be reaching for a big slice of Humble Pie. Or who knows, the tumbler of scotch and the revolver?

Yep, they’re not playing Hold’em. They are playing Omaha. Ash has four cards: 8s 9s and an unspecified 10 and J.”

Oops, that’s a bit embarrassing, to say the least. I guess Grub Smith is only a recent convert to the holy game and has never played Omaha. As I said, this play was written at least ten years ago, well before the poker boom, which we all know actually means Holdem boom.

I shall leave the last word to another reader of Grub’s blog:

“Oh Smith, you’ve done it again!!!! What a world class wally…way to take on a literary Goliath only to be found to be armed with nothing more than a stick of celery…you are the George Bush of the poker journalism world.”

I Want to be a Tournament Player?

Many bloggers are posting up their new year’s resolution and goals. These usually tend to be quite mundane and of the win-more-money and move-up-the-limits type of thing.

Terrence Chan has an interesting post along these lines where he realizes that his days as a high stakes limit Holdem player may be numbered due to the action online drying up. Unusually for a dyed-in-the-wool cash player he is thinking of becoming a tournament player.

“As distasteful as it is to my soul, I have flirted with the idea of becoming a "name" tournament player. It's distasteful because I've always thought of poker as one of the truly merit-based businesses. But that's becoming less and less the case. For the first time in the history of poker, the biggest winners aren't the people winning in the biggest cash games; they're the people having their buy-ins and expenses paid for, getting salaried by poker sites, and occasionally cashing in some tournament because it was inevitable they would eventually do so.”

I really like his take on this subject – it seems like most poker players these days crave the limelight and would give anything to be recognized as a top “pro”. Or maybe Chan has just found a cleverer way to justify why he wants to get into the live tournament scene? Unlikely, as he goes on to write,

“And no one really talks about this, either. I've noticed in blogs, magazine articles and interviews that the "name" players just kind of talk about how good they play and how much money they've made; they rarely talk about how their primary source of income is no longer the playing of poker, but rather the residuals. It's pretty easy to be a winning player when you're buying in with other people's money and keeping all of the winnings.”

Wow, that is so true. I wonder how long it will be before certain faces get appearance fees for certain tournaments. Or maybe this is going on already?

Don't Look Back

Another popular type of blog entry at this time of year is a look back at the past year. These usually tend to be thinly veiled brags about how much money they won last year which is fair enough I suppose. What’s the point of getting the absolute lot if nobody knows?

Anyway, one player who didn’t have a winning year last year was Shannon Shorr and he writes a long entry in his blog giving us full details of how 2007 went for him. If you can get past the fact that Shorr doesn’t believe in using paragraphs, you might find this blog vaguely interesting.

“I started out in January and did a bunch of live tournaments. I went PCA to Aussie to Tunica to Atlantic City and then to Biloxi for one event in early February. I managed to airball everything there, and dug myself an even bigger hole by playing high stakes Chinese poker without any knowledge of the game while in Australia. It was my biggest mistake to this point in my career as we were playing very big.”

And so on. He goes on to list some close finishes in some other tournaments as well as all the times he whiffed and ended up doing his cobblers.

Essentially this blog is a good illustration of how hard it is to be a winning tournament player. I believe he uses the phrase “heart breaking” several times which sums it up. It’s also a good lesson in bankroll management in which Shorr seems to have no discipline in whatsoever.

Bluescouse is Back!

Talking of bankroll management how’s our old pal Bluescouse doing? Well, it seems that young Ed Hollis went skint and borrowed a load of money and has somehow clawed his way back to playing no limit holdem with $100/$200 blinds.

Wow, great comeback eh? His tank must be fairly healthy now yeah?

“….so i should finish the year with a roll of £25,500.”

How this kid stayed in action and found people to lend him money I’ll never know. To be fair he also writes,

“…how i'm going to keep hold of my £25,500 i'm not sure. i'll think about that tomorrow.”

I love the part about thinking about it tomorrow. What price does anyone out there give me that that £25 grand wasn’t straight back in the game the next day?

What a Player

TJ Cloutier continues his stories about the old days on his blog at Pokerpages with a good hand between Bob Hooks and Kenny “Whatta Player” Smith.

“Hooks limped in and Smith raised the pot up a pretty good amount of money. It came back to Bob and he moved in his whole stack with two kings. Kenny put the stall on him for about three minutes, didn't look like he was ever going to act on his hand. So Bob looks over and grabs Kenny's cards out of his hand and sees two aces. And he moves Ken's chips into the pot himself! Kenny never had to put his own money in, Bob put it in for him. I'll bet that was the only time Bob ever lost a hand when he put the money in for both players.”

The funny thing is that I can think of many players who would do the same thing. This makes sense when you think about it because the second favourite pastime of poker players after telling bad beat stories is muttering statements along the lines of “How could he fold/call??!!??”.

I mean if I moved all-in with kings and my opponent actually considers folding aces here I think I would actually feel offended. It goes against the poker players’ code (if there is such a thing, which basically there isn’t) doesn’t it?

Happy New Year.

Hugo 'Chimney Sweep' Martin

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