stevesbets

I care about my readers and I wish I could respond to every email I get, but for a couple of reasons I can’t so what I’m going to try to do is respond to general questions I get here from time to time. If a question is particularly insightful, interesting, funny or weird I may post it and respond.

Alot of emails I get ask for backing, I don’t really ever back anyone besides close friends so it’s probably better to just not bother asking unless I know your name, your face, and what your college friends called you. One person asked me what a “standard” backing deal is. The answer is that there is no standard, it all depends on the skill of the player, the comfort of the backer, and the closeness of the relationship. I will say this, almost any reasonable deal includes makeup which means that if the backer puts the player into 10 tournaments for 10k apiece, he gets the first 100k in cashes off the top before the profit is divided up as the parties see fit. So if the player loses 9 and cashes for 97k in the 10th tourney, the backer just gets all 97k back. After this I would say “standard” is the player getting between 25% and 50% of the profit.

Another common question I get is whether I think pokerstars may be rigged for all sorts of reasons. We all question the integrity of the sites at some point or another, especially during downswings. When Lars Magne was on his tear at high stakes HU sngs, I remember everyone told me he was so great, and one time he called q9 all in first hand and beat my aq, then called a7 all in first hand of the next one and beat my AA. Everyone said he was the best, but this was how he beat me that day. I fired off an accusatory email to pokerstars but later just felt stupid, I wish I had a copy of it that I could post. The fact of the matter is that the sites make WAY too much money for them to rig it for any reason so if you are going to be sure of anything, be sure of greed, and know that they would never want to hurt themselves by rigging it and risk getting caught in a scandal ending their insane gravy train.

Finally, I got the following email:

“hi sorry fo my bad english
i look you every night in italy in stg tournaments…i want to make compliments for your game very exciting and aggressive..i am new in poker and i lost 4000 dollars in heads up….How did you start in poker?
You have to give me some advice?
I admire you very
my nick is ce_vedems and i hope One day I might have a bankroll suitable to be able to challenge with you
bye

In response, I started playing low stakes sngs on party, as low as 5 dollars. I did it in college and worked my way up. The only way to learn is to be willing to lose and practice practice practice. Just like everything else in life it comes down to two things, how bad you want it, and how lucky you are…ok maybe just one thing:) Thanks for the complements, and where are you from in Italy?

An interesting situation arose during a marathon 2k hu sng session with a headsup regular last night. We were playing one match and he was sitting in another, I only really wanted to play one at a time but I then said to my buddy online, “I’m going to bed soon, I’ll join the other then sleep”. Immediately after joining the other it became obvious that he was disconnected. He thus was sitting out of the new match and disconnected from the other and I had to decide whether to “steal” his blinds.

My policy on this is to always “steal” unless the player has had the situation reversed in the past and not stolen from me. Believe it or not, the basis of this policy is not greed, it is actually the opposite: fairness. I have lost many many dollars due to disconnecting in sng’s and not once thus far has an opponent waited for me to return. Furthermore I don’t expect them too. For many reasons it isn’t practical, the largest one being that you don’t know if or when they will return for hours! To further illustrate this point, I was sitting in a 5500 heads up match a while back and got disconnected and didn’t play the entire thing. My opponent took all my chips and consequently won the 5500. I’m not going to mention his name because he has become fairly famous and I don’t want to bring any negative press to him, but this was a guy I had met before and had talked to at decent length. We weren’t friends, but we definitely knew each other so if anyone would have cut me a break it would have been someone like him. With that said, I harbored no ill will towards him, and next time I saw him I didn’t utter a single complaint.

The bottom line is, disconnects are an inevitable part of playing sngs online. They happen to everyone, and as long as everyone has the same response to them it will even out in the end. My opponent got back very quickly, i had only “stolen” about 100 chips, and he called it a classless to be “stealing” from a regular. I tried to explain my policy but he didn’t buy it, he said if it’s a regular you are playing, then you should wait. I didn’t want to delve into the lack of game theoretical correctness of his policy or the unwieldiness of it given that you don’t know how long you will have to wait so I told him I would write a blog about it.

The other part of my actions he called classless were joining when I knew he was disconnected. As I said above, I had no idea he was disconnected when I joined so that wasn’t my intent, but it does bring up another interesting ethical question of what is the “right” move there. I’m pretty sure my policy is the same, to join and steal because if you don’t someone else will, but that one I cannot morally justify with such clarity so I’m not totally sure. As a side note he ended up winning both of those games.

This was far from the first time I’ve dealt with this situation, one memorable time was on Full Tilt playing a 2k sng vs Roland De Wolfe. He disconnected so I followed my policy and blinded him off. When he got back to my table he came at me with a rare fury, calling me every name in the book. I tried to explain but he had no interest in hearing it. I did take offense at the time to the names I was being called given what I feel is perfectly proper moral justification for my actions. Some people are just caught up in their moral outrage and will never listen.

So the bottom line, if I disconnect and you take my chips, I will never complain to you or get angry at you for it. If you don’t take them, I will extend you the same courtesy in the future. If I don’t know what you will do, I refuse to do the long run losing act of not taking when others always do take so I will “steal” your blinds. If anyone thinks this is an unfair policy I welcome comments.

If you watch out for it, you can see about a million absurd ways in which people are negative for no reason at all, but this blog will focus on just one that is near and dear to any reader that watches poker forums. I got an email recently saying somethign to the effect of, “you think you’re smart because you can write a blog, newsflash, no one cares!”

On forums I often see posts that are very similar to this email. People read something and then insist on replying to it by saying something about how nobody cares, they can say it any number of ways. Examples include, “why don’t you two get a room, no one else cares”, “I can’t believe I wasted 5 minutes of my life reading that”, “boooooring, next post please” or my personal favorite, “Do you ACTUALLY think anyone wants to read that?”.

Let’s put the hypocrisy of all these statements aside for a second and they STILL are among the most banal and pointlessly negative positions anyone can have. If the writer’s of these statements think things are boring or pointless there is NOTHING FORCING THEM TO READ.  Now back to the hypocrisy, they DID READ IT. I cannot hide my disgust for the people that waste my time writing comments like that ;)

A guy has been trying to scam me for the last week for varying amounts that got even as paltry as 100$. In the end, all he made out with was 15 minutes of my time, but i’m pretty pissed that he even got that. I hate scammers more than just about anybody alive so even though this guy didn’t get anything I’m going to devote some resources to tracking him down and messing up his online accounts to be sure he wont scam anyone in the future. Here is the info I have so far, let me know if anyone has heard anything about it.

his Email: stocks30@hotmail.com

his AIM: VentureCapKid

his phone number: 2678093765

his stars name: riverissues3

of all of this, the only thing that i’m fairly certain is really his is the stars name because I doubt that if i had decided to send him money, he would have wanted me to send it to the wrong place. Time to get to it and make sure these scammers don’t ever hurt anyone.

As they say in V for Vendetta: Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have.

Tonight I took my sister to see the Sixers play the Rockets. The sixers actually blew the rockets out which you know is pretty unbelievable if you are following how terrible they are, I mean, how good can you be when Andre Iguodala is your star.

A couple or random things that really annoyed me tonight, they basically all relate to people not knowing where their seats are, and rather than finding out the proper way, they have no regard for inconveniencing others. The first example came just after tip off, my sister and I were in my seats on the aisle and two big guys came and motioned that they wanted us to stand up so they could get in the row. Fine, we were eating, so we put our stuff aside and carefully stood up to let the guys by. They walked by and started walking through the row making everyone get up for them. Much to my surprise, they walked ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE ROW AND OUT THE OTHER SIDE. They then took a seat on the aisle of the next section over. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, I would explain more but I don’t think its needed. Someone else did something very similar a little later.

The next thing people do which is really annoying is standing aimlessly in aisles paying no attention to what is going on around them. I can’t imagine what goes on in these peoples minds…”Someone trying to get by me, who cares, i ain’t moving, someone whos view i’m blockign by standing here…who cares i aint moving, someone selling concessions who needs to get by, screw him I AINT MOVING” These people may be worse than the first type.

Tonight was dollar dog night which means they sold hot dogs at the bargain basement price of a dollar apiece. To promote the promotion, hip hop (the sixers mascot) and his crew of “hare raisers” came out to throw hot dogs into the stands. The craziest thing resulted, the crowd went NUTS for these dollar dogs, it was a bigger reaction than any the sixers got the entire game despite their high level of play. Not only is it weird for hot dogs to command such desire, but especially rolled up dirty hot dogs being thrust around a stadium by random guys, wow!!

A final thought, I was very impressed with hip hop. I think being a mascot requires a very special skill set that most people dont have. Not only does he have to be funny at all times while being appropriate, but he has to do all this without saying any words! How many people do you know that can do that? It really shows how much of communication is non verbal. I dont feel like proofreading so i’m just going to post this.

I decided to go to the Borgata in Atlantic City yesterday to visit a couple of my friends from college who happened to be there: Rat and Shallow. As it turned out my buddy from NYC, Stone, also showed up there so it was a fun night of catching up. In the process of seeing my friends, I also discovered a 25 50 NL game going that was pretty good so I decided to play. Some of the things I witnessed throughout the night in this game were pretty impressive.

Early in the night the game was full of mostly regulars and semi-regulars, some of whom are solid and some of whom are not. One guy, Chris, who I played with at Commerce in LA last year was there. We had a bit of history, in LA I pegged him as kind of an arrogant jerk but last night he seemed overall like a pretty cool guy. In LA we had played a hand at 20 40 nl where I had 33, and he decided to limp reraise me to 2k with a5o, i called with 33 and flopped a set, and I won a pretty big pot when he turned an ace. In LA he got so pissed and challenged me to Heads up and all the usual crap that aggressive Alpha types do when they lose a pot. He informed me early on in the game last night that he wouldn’t quit as long as I wanted to play short handed so we could be playing a long time.

As the night went on the game began getting short and eventually it was down to just the two of us. It was 3 am or so and I kind of wanted to leave, but he was stuck and I can’t really turn down a heads up challenge. We upped the blinds to 50 100 and started playing. Within about 30 minutes, two players from the 10 20 nl game came over saying their game broke and they wanted to play 25 50 with us. One was a quiet asian guy (QAG) and the other was a garrulous middle aged guy (GMAG). Chris told them that we were playign 50 100 now which was obviously way more than either of them felt comfortable with, but never underestimate people’s desire to gamble, they both sat down with 3k and 6k stacks respectively.

Very soon after they sat down it was obvious that GMAG had zero shot to hold onto the 6k he had in front of him. He played one hand that was perhaps the worst I’ve ever seen a hand played. he raised under the gun 4 handed and Chris reraised him to 1k from the big blind, GMAG called (bear in mind he had about 4500 in front of him total before the hand). Flop t86 rainbow, Chris checks, GMAG checks. turn Q, Christ checks, GMAG bets 400 (into a 2k pot), Chris calls. River J making the board 68TQJ. Chris reaches for his chips as if he’s going to bet about 1000, but before he can even put his bet out GMAG declares I’m all in, so Chris takes his bet back and mucks, GMAG turns up his hand anyway, it’s 66…I don’t think I need to go any further with why that is utterly bizarre.

Soon after that hand GMAG busted and left so it was 3 handed with Chris and Qag. Qag had some huge holes too including but not limited to calling 1k preflop with about 1200 behind and then folding on the flop. He soon busted too and Chris and I were heads up again.

Overall I ran super hot and was up a good amount on the night, Chris was still stuck and wanted to keep playing despite it being about 6am. This is why I don’t play live much, I couldn’t say no. It was really amazing, he had about 10k in front of him and I had him covered, overall we played heads up for about 5 hours and he didn’t get all in once, it really is so different from the online game. When 9am rolled around he asked if I wanted to switch it to PLO so we did. Finally the big pots started coming, I continued running hot and eventually busted him. Overall i think Chris is a solid player and I think a good guy who has finally been humbled by running bad (I remember in LA he told me that since poker is a skill game he believes its possible to basically never have a losing session and in fact that he hardly every does, I bet if you asked him now he would retract those comments). So overall it wasn’t the best spot in the world (except when GMAG and QAG were there) but hey, I was running hot.

The ride home at 11am was actually terrifying because I was so tired and uncomfortable. I luckily narrowly avoided Eagles traffic, got back to my place by noon and promptly fell asleep on the couch. I forced myself to wake up around 530 so that I could go to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight and finally be among the living in terms of sleep schedule.

    So today my wire to pokerstars came through and I started playing 500, 1k and 2k Heads up sit n goes again as per my bet with N 82. This is not the type of blog where I will recount all the games I played that day, the big hands, the emotional journey, and then give all my readers a neat win or loss amount so that they can vicariously follow me. I may however start occasionally posting about actual poker since thats what some people want to see.

When I post, the blog entries will take the form of interesting hands from my day. I’m not going to analyze them and say a player was great or terrible, or that their play was highly unusual. Nor will I justify or explain my own play. I’m doing this for a number of reasons and I think most of you will be able to read the hand histories and interpret for yourselves. I’m going to try not to post hands that are just standard bad beats I take or lay on other people.

Another thing I won’t do is constantly make silly plans, post about them on my blog, and then constantly update you on them like many blogs do…with that said, my progress on the goals I posted is as follows:

-Prop bet looking good, the 600 sng minimum will be zero trouble so its just a matter of discipline

-I haven’t bitten my nails for 5 hours, hoping to keep the momentum going

-I’ve been to the gym twice since that post which is NOT every day unfortunately

-I still have 9 business school essays to write.

I’m going to wake up for the Monte Carlo satellite tomorrow if anyone wants to watch (1 pm EST). I’m also going to try to knockout at least 20 sngs and 3 essays before heading to AC for the night to visit with shreep. I promise no blog this week will be as boring as this one, and I don’t make too many promises.

I wrote an essay for a business school application today so I don’t really feel like blogging, I figure I will post a rough draft of the essay since it is poker related and will probably interest you all anyway. There is one blank in it and I would like suggestions for who to plug into it, a notably unlucky historical figure. The topic for this essay is: Describe a failure or setback that you have experienced. What role did you play, and what did you learn about yourself? (500 words).

Enjoy:

A memorable failure came a year into my poker career. I was in college at the time but nonetheless considered myself a professional given the stakes I was playing and the time I put into being a poker player. Throughout the first year I had gradually built the money I had to play with (known as bankroll) through careful thought, sharp math skills, and most importantly, excellent discipline. The less glamorous side of being a poker professional is the absolute necessity of that last skill: discipline. Getting caught up in the allure of quick riches can be intoxicating, and if you play games that you cannot afford, you can go broke even if you play with exceptional skill. Since I was still relatively new to the game, I learned this truism the hard way after playing games that I could barely afford, then after losing a bit, being unable to move down stakes and play at a more responsible level.

As I saw my money drift away day after day I blamed mostly terrible luck for my poor fate. After about 2 months of playing irresponsibly and truly being pretty unlucky, I lost basically the last of my bankroll. I began questioning my ability to play and even things I knew to be true like the fact that no one can be “lucky” or “unlucky” when it comes to expected value in the long run. Only when I got to the point that I was able to accept that my own deficits as a professional poker player were what caused my downfall was I able to begin to take steps to fix it. I realized that the truth of my situation was that I was indeed unlucky. This lack of luck however, was not the impetus for my problem; everyone in any business will experience a tide of misfortune at some point. To stay successful one must be exercising proper discipline at the time that misfortune strikes. For poker that means play in games you can afford even if you have a streak of misfortune that would rival ____.

I finally was able to begin rebuilding. The first step was to reach out to my poker contacts to find someone who had faith in me that would “stake” me. This means one player puts up the money for another to play and gets a percentage of the profit. If the player loses, the “staker” takes the brunt of the loss. I was fortunate to have a number of others who had faith in my poker game. I played with someone’s money and won enough for myself to rebuild and for the man who staked me to be very pleased.

Through this setback I learned to get back in my control something that seemed out of it, I needed to accept personal responsibility for 100% of the problem, and then take the necessary steps to fix it.

“I like to steal from wawa, it’s so easy, you can just put stuff under your coat”…was I seriously sitting across a booth at the Bombay Cafe in the Taj in Atlantic City, dead broke, at 2am with someone I hardly knew who was a serial Wawa thief? How did I get here…

My friends’ and I had all started playing poker in the dorms a few weeks earlier, we had learned that they had 2$ 4$ limit hold em games at the Taj (we played a game similar to limit hold em with each other). My friends and I decided that it would be fun to take a trip down to Atlantic City and try some real poker at these lowest available stakes despite the fact that we could all hardly afford even 2$ 4$ at the time. I was still not really in poker mode so I planned to play blackjack with the 100$ or so that I had access too while the rest of the guys planned to play poker. I referred to most of them in a previous post, Mitten and Gaston were there, along with two other friends I’ll call Xylophone and JJ.

I was driving the van with everyone, each of us locked and loaded with about 100$ or a bit more, and ready for our first night of casino gambling. Mitten, Gaston and JJ wanted to run to Wawa to get a snack for the ride. When they came out they had another guy, I’ll call him “Wes” with them. We had played poker in the dorm with Wes once or twice, so  when they ran into him in Wawa they figured they may as well invite him along.

So the 6 of us drove the hour to Atlantic City, upon arrival the 5 of them went to the poker room and I headed to the blackjack pit. It was cool seeing the sights that we had witnessed hundreds of times in the movie “Rounders”. I started playing 15$ a hand blackjack, as you can imagine with a mere 100$ bankroll I was broke before long and I headed to the poker room to find my friends. They were all in various 2 4 Holdem games and seemed to be enjoying themselves. I see JJ flip up a j5o (which he played in middle position) to scoop a big pot with two pair and he says, “around the dorm we call that the money hand”. He was playing god awful but running hot, Mitten was laughing at him from across the table.

Wes had also had no luck, and he was with me broke on the rail. We were badgering our friends to leave since we couldn’t play, but since they were playing terribly, some of the other players wanted them to stay. This led one man at the table to give us a comp card and told us he would treat us to a meal at the Taj all night diner (the Bombay Cafe). So we got the voucher for the meal (redeemable that night only) and headed to eat.

I became more and more terrified of the the company I was keeping as the meal progressed. Aside from the gem about Wawa that I opened this blog entry with, I learned that Wes was basically a liar, a cheater and a thief. Not only was he willing to bend moral lines for personal gain, but he would bend them just for the sake of it! He just would do ANYTHING he could get away with even if it offered him NO benefit at all because it got his juices flowing. Nothing characterizes this more than when we finished the meal and I threw the voucher (once again, we had no choice but to use this voucher now or never… after this meal it became worthless) on the table. Wes grabbed it and said to me, “No, don’t pay! They aren’t watching us, let’s skip out on the check!” At this point I realized I was in the presence of a true psychopath.

I insisted we leave the voucher, and we soon all left Atlantic City. JJ thought he was the greatest since he had won the most on the trip, nearly everyone was excited about our first trip to the casino. After we parted company with Wes, I told everyone the stories from our trip to the Bombay Cafe. It was at this point that we realized that when we first invited him to AC we interrupted him from committing grand theft Wawa!

Before I start, a few notes to my readers. Firstly I judge how much a topic is enjoyed by the number of comments it generates so definitely comment good and bad, secondly, some people have asked about linking, I will post a link to anyone’s blog who has a link to mine, so just let me know and we can add each other.

I’m in kind of a bad mood tonight so I’m going to write about something that really annoys me; people that just don’t understand/can’t follow ANYTHING. I find very little more uncomfortable than being at a movie with someone and feeling like they have no clue what is going on because they can’t or won’t pay attention. Another situation that is irritating is when two people are talking, for example a customer ordering food from a waitress, and I know that the order is going to be messed up because the customer doesn’t say it clearly enough, the waitress isn’t listening or some combination of the two.

Note that this has little to do with intelligence. Mainly it has to do with a person’s wiillingness to listen and try to understand, that is why it bothers me, not dumbness, just lack of effort. For example I have one friend who is a great guy by most standards but he hardly EVER listens to a word that is said. For that reason he is often left clueless in group conversations. Sometimes when speaking to him one on one it gets to the point where I could say something to the effect of, “my team ended up losing the game 4-2″ and he would instantly respond, “did you lose? by how much?”. Sadly that is not an exaggeration. Aside from not listening, they don’t absorb their surroundings or things that are embedded inside of the statements’ and body language of others.

The more depressing point here is that SO MANY of the people in this world are like this, (although for some reason its mostly men). They don’t have either the energy or the desire to pick up and analyze anything. I have some good friends who I could go out in a large group with, then after the fact they will remember everything that is said and done throughout the night out. These people are way easier to connect with because you can discuss a whole range of topics based on experience without them just responding, “who?” or “what” to everything. I’d go as far as saying that for people who don’t listen to or notice anything around them are only partially living, thats what makes them hard to connect to, they are only half human. Now everyone zones out sometimes, that’s not at all what I’m talking about, I’m talking about those for who its constant, it’s habitual.

I’m rereading what I have written so far and I am not quite sure I’m fully conveying the annoying trait that I’m speaking about. An example (this hasn’t happened to me, just making it up) would be if you’re on a double date with your girlfriend, then when you go home you say, “wow when he gave her that look after she talked about the dog, that seemed vicious, what do you think it meant”? If your girlfriend didn’t notice the look, didn’t remember hearing about the dog, and also had the same non reaction to various other parts of the night then she very well may be one of these people.

This whole blog is kind of preachy, I probably would never say it to anyone, but it’s my blog, I can write whatever I want and I’ve already wasted some time on it so I may as well post it.

What? Who?