Risk Oriented

As the dealer shuffles the cards and flings two to each player around the table, we each in turn look down at our hand and assess our chances to win the hand. The first several players fold, but the lady sitting directly to my right makes a large raise. I look down at my hand and like my chances, so I call. After the first three cards are dealt, she bets again. I look at the table, reach down to grab chips, and raise. She thinks for a second and discards her hand.

“How did you know I was bluffing?” she asks.

I respond, “From watching your past play, I knew that when you raised before the flop, you had two face cards or a pocket pair. On the flop, there was just one face card, an Ace. I calculated that of the 18 possible hands you might hold, you had only made a pair with 4 of them, so my raise makes you fold 77% of the time. From there I calculated that with what I stood to risk and what I stood to win, I would earn, in the long run, $4 by raising. To bet there, you would have to expect me to fold at least 35% of the time, but since I would have raised your bet no matter what my two cards were, you made a mistake by betting.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” she responds.

This weekend, we rolled out a soft launch of Risk Oriented Gold and have had a number of users sign up already. We hope that we worked out all of the registration kinks (there were a few!) and everybody is using all of our paid services successfully now.

As a thank you and as a promotion to get you to try Risk Oriented Gold, I’m offering a special deal. If you book a 30-minute coaching session on LiveNinja (for a limited time, just $4.99), we’ll give you three months of Risk Oriented Gold for free. This also includes access to our Start Winning Seminar, a $9.99 value.

You can book coaching here or from the LiveNinja widget in the sidebar.

Clipped a couple of articles that are relevant to poker from the New York Times. The first discusses the game theory found in Jane Austen’s books: titles like Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma. You can read the full article here. According to the author of a new book, Michael Chwe, Austen’s characters underlined many of their decisions throughout the novels with strategic thinking that predates von Neumann’s “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” from 1944.

“Most game theory, he noted, treats players as equally “rational” parties sitting across a chessboard. But many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize it even needs to think strategically.”
Read More

Low hanging fruit arbitrage bet tonight, if you’ve got a rollover bonus to work off on either of these sites…

Take Michigan at +170 on BetOnline and take Louisville at -170 on CarbonSports.

You’ll break even 100% of the time after rake. Bet $100 on Michigan at BetOnline and $170 on Louisville at Carbon, end the night +0%.

Update: It looks like most of the sportsbooks closed this great line down. Currently the line is +105 Syracuse, which makes this bet much weaker and probably unprofitable.

The weather is nice in Syracuse today, a welcome change from the blustery winter that much of the Northeast saw. I’m sitting outside Acropolis, a local pizza joint that’s only worth visiting for its Turkish coffee, with an old Italian man.

The man, dressed in a tweed blazer with mottled brown horn-rimmed glasses, is a very curious student. Often, I wonder whether or not he knows what I’m supposed to be teaching him better than I do, but his demeanor and eagerness to learn and ask question never belies this fact.

In passing as we finished, I asked him if he was aware of Nate Silver, the prolific statistician for the New York Times who has had an excellent track record in the past at predicting baseball scores, elections, and everything in between. Nate, I said, had given the Syracuse Orange a 48.1% chance to win the semi-final game of the NCAA March Madness tournament, while the sportsbook line pays out at +120. The question he asked, at first, surprised me: “What does that mean?”
Read More

Decided to do something a little different and live steam a multi-table tournament I’m playing in so that we can all talk strategy.

If you’re on twitter, please feel free to use the hashtag #risklive to tweet comments and questions.

After the live stream is over, this will be archived for repeat viewing.

I’m sitting in the bar at the Casinó di Venezia with Sandor Demjan, the richest man in Hungary, worth over $4 billion. When we met before, in Krakow, Poland, we played together for nearly twelve hours before the morning light broke up the game and sent us our separate ways.

Sandor has just busted out of the WPT Venice. His hand, , didn’t hold up after a pre-flop reraise puts him all-in against .

I can always hear the sea calling anytime I’m in Venice: it sings the soft, gentle song of the whale. I invite Sandor to a game I have scheduled for tomorrow night. I am certain he will attend.

I’m in Oslo, Norway, inside a hostel at the base of Holmenkollbakken, one of the world’s largest man-made ski jumps. My five new friends are adrenaline junkies from Germany. They have each taken the week off to enjoy one of the last skiing weekends of the season. I am not a skier, but I understand the motivation: I often make the same decision at the end of golf season.

I’m here for just one reason: the Germans.

We sit down to play, and I make sure to position myself to the left of Anton, the player who seemed most eager to play with me. Typically, when an opponent is extremely eager to play poker, they’re either very good or very bad. In either case, it behooves you to act directly after they do.

I take out a bottle of Christiania Vodka and we let the game begin.

At the Commerce, 4pm is the precise moment when no one looks at you funny whether you’re drinking a coffee or a beer, and after a long day of cards, I needed to have both. In the cupholder to my left, a Stella Artois. To my right, a mug that I picked up years ago in the United Kingdom in the colors of the Union Jack.

In chips, I had just over $1,500. The game was a very aggressive $5/$10 No Limit Hold’em with six players besides myself. The two men directly across the table, distracted by the basketball game on the TV, were my marks. Of the last ten hands I watched, they were both in a majority of them, together, betting and raising with the conviction of someone who knows the other person is full of shit. They are both right. When I look down at the in the cutoff, I decide to gamble. Villain 1, under the gun, raises to $30, and Villain 2, MP calls. The table folds to me, and I call.

The flop might have produced an audible groan in the shoes of a lesser man.
After Flop:

I am never confident looking at a middling flush draw against aggressive opponents, but when Villain 1 bets $50 and Villain 2 calls, I decide to come along for another card. Fortunately, my hand gets much stronger on the turn, which brings a , giving me the nut straight and hoping, now, that the flush doesn’t come after all.

After Turn:

To my delight, Villain 1 bets $100 and Villain 2 overbets the pot, $350. I push the rest of my chips in, happy to shut the hand down now, without letting any more cards come that could take away the big pot I stand to win. Villain 1 folds immediately, but villain 2 surprises me with a call. I turn over my cards, for the straight, and he turns over , for an unfortunate set. The river blanks, and I rake in the pot.

He throws his cards across the table, his anger at the cards only magnified by the fact that Georgetown was losing, badly, to Florida Gulf Coast.

I’m on the patio of Positano’s Le Sirenuse, on the Amalfi coast, sipping granita di caffé. The afternoon wind whips the hair of Ciji, a beautiful, and merciless, poker player I met here in the city. Her espresso has just been refilled by the tall, thin maître d’hôtel, but she doesn’t notice as she continues to rave about the softness of the game she played in the back room at the club where we met the night before.

The game of the night was Pot Limit Omaha, and her opponent is the night’s big winner, a tall, Finnish guy whose name doesn’t matter, because with over $20,000 in front of him, he far outstacked Ciji, who had just $2,000. Blinds were $10 and $20.

Ciji is on the button with Ac Jc Kh 2h, and the cutoff raises to $40. Ciji, liking her AJK2ss, three-bets to $150. The Big Blind calls, as does the cutoff.
Ciji’s Hand

The flop helps some, with Kd 8c and 6h showing. The BB bets out, $230. The cutoff, who originally raised, now folds, and Ciji calls.

After Flop:

The turn brings Qh, and the BB bets large again, $660. Ciji calls with top pair and a nut flush draw.

After Turn:

The river brings the Ks, giving Ciji top trips. The BB bets again, $870. Ciji stops abruptly and asks, “what should I do here?” The answer to me is very clear.

After River:

I have another sip of coffee as I think about extending my stay in Italy for a few more days. What would you do?