At this time of my life, video poker is relatively easy to me. I’ve studied the game for 17 years, played 30,000 or so hours, taught 500 classes, and have written thousands of pages on the subject. Learning a new video poker game is usually a piece of cake for me.
Live poker is another kettle of fish altogether.
I was invited to play in the 2011 World Series of Poker Media Tournament in mid-July. I’m not really WSOP media, but I did interview Nolan Dalla (media director of the WSOP) and Blair Rodman (successful poker player and author of Kill Phil) on my Gambling with an Edge radio show and I guess that qualified me enough to be invited. (I actually requested to be invited — and even added my impending interview with Annie Duke as part of my “qualifications” being media. By next year, I will have interviewed many more poker players as part of the Gambling with an Edge radio show so it should be a no-brainer to be invited again.)
The tournament was free and the prizes were modest. Still first place was an iPAD2, second was a flat screen TV, and third was an XBOX360. Prizes officially went nine deep, but frankly I wasn’t lusting over the WSOP T-shirts for eighth place or the Rounders DVD for ninth.
This was my first poker tournament ever. I had played draw poker a few times in Gardena, CA about 35 to 40 years ago, but no poker of any kind since. I’ve read free copies of CardPlayer and other poker magazines off and on for years, and I’ve watched perhaps 50 hours of poker on television, so I’m not a total novice. But on TV they show you the hole cards — and in a tournament they don’t.
I had read Kill Phil a few weeks earlier in preparation for my interview with Blair Rodman. I knew the book was designed for a novice hoping to have a chance playing a Texas Hold’Em tournament with experienced players. That fit me perfectly. Instead of being the experienced pro, as I was used to being at video poker, I was the newbie at a very different gambling game. The shoe was indeed on the other foot.
KP has four strategies in it. The rookie strategy is for total newbies. I couldn’t bring myself to play that one. While this was to be a first-time experience for me, I was hardly a complete novice at gambling. Plus I had a lot of experience following strategies. So I opted for the “basic” KP strategy.
Somehow I decided to allocate four hours to learning this strategy. How did I come up with that figure? I guess I felt three hours wasn’t enough and five was excessive! It’s still a mystery to me, but it felt right at the time.
The basic KP strategy gives you a list of 10 categories of starting two-card hands. AA and KK are in Group 1, of course, and Group 10 goes down to QJ and hands like a suited 68. Whether you play the cards in Group 1, Group 2, . . . Group 10 or not depends on how many chips you have relative to how much the blinds and antes are. It also depends on which position you are in, where position refers to how many players bet before you.
In four hours I had it all down — or so I thought. In actual practice, this was too much for me to try to master for my first tournament. Your position rotates every hand (as the dealer “button” is moved around the table) and the blind levels and ante levels changed faster than I thought they would. This meant that I had to frequently re-calculate how big my stack was compared to a round of play, and I kept getting mixed up as to how the betting rules changed in early position versus middle position versus late position.
After I read Kill Phil and before I played, I spent about 10 hours reading Annie Duke’s Decide to Play Great Poker for the interview that was scheduled to take place a month after the tournament. (Download the August 4 interview with Annie Duke at bobdancer.com) The two books have very different approaches. KP provides a simplified recipe — which was probably what I needed at the time. Decide teaches you how to make better decisions at the table, which would be relevant if becoming a good poker player were one of my goals. If you’re good enough to keep the messages from both books straight — you’re probably too good to need to use KP in the first place. Since I’m not that good, studying both books simultaneously was too much, too fast.
Still, since everybody started with huge stacks and the requirements for betting with huge stacks are pretty stringent, I folded most of my hands and just watched and learned things I didn’t know (like who bets first after the flop — or if the bet to you is $500 and you put out a $1,000 chip without saying anything, you are actually calling the $500 bet and not raising to $1,000. I had no idea this was how it was done.) While I kept folding, others bet and got knocked out. Once our table lost three players, our table was broken up and we were assigned to fill in spots at other tables where they had lost players. I had figured out one guy who bluffs all the time — and I was going to call him lighter than KP said to — when our table broke and I went somewhere else to a group of brand new people.
One thing to shoot for in these tournaments was the “bounties.” Twelve of the 130 original players had a bounty on their head. If you knocked one of them out, you received a pair of Klipsch Image One headphones.
In the second table I was at, I was “all in” once — with a pair of deuces. This is not a strong hand, but I was in the big blind and I think it was the correct play according to the strategy. On the last card I needed another deuce (for a set of three deuces) or a three (for a straight) or I was out. A beautiful three appeared and I was still alive. What a good player I am!
At the third table I was at I actually busted somebody with a bounty. He told me his name was Eric. I guess he’s important in the WSOP world, but I have no idea of who he is. But I like the headphones!
With 18 people left I was one of the chip leaders! I was only playing strong hands and they were holding up. It felt good to be a winner! That’s what the book said would happen, and you know that if it’s in a book it must be true!
Then things started to go south. A woman with about a third the stack size I had went all in. Everybody folded until it got to me. I looked at my cards and saw a suited AQ. This was an easy call. She turned over an unsuited A7, so I was ahead, but a 7 flopped and I lost a third of my stack. Two hands later I called another all in bet and lost again. Now I was short stacked and looked down at a pair of 3s. I bet everything and was called by two players, one of whom also had a pair of 3s, and the other had an A8. One 8 on the river knocked me out of the tournament — probably in about 15th place.
Should I enter another tournament in the near future (not likely), with another hour of study I’d probably be able to execute the basic KP strategy a lot better than I did this time. It takes some experience for the strategy to kick in. If I played several more times, I’d likely go onto the intermediate or advanced KP strategies. There are even Kill Everyone and The Raiser’s Edge as sequels to Kill Phil, not to mention dozens of books by other authors. The more I play, the more capacity I have to understand what these authors are talking about.
The same in video poker. You can read the Winner’s Guides all you want, but until you get out there and play the game, you’re going to forget much of what you read. It takes a lot of going back-and-forth between the playing and the reading to master these games.
It was a fun experience — and I enjoyed the learning process. But I don’t fancy playing a lot of poker is in my future. Of course, if they invite me to another free roll at next year’s WSOP, I’ll go. But it will be a year since this year’s experience, so I will have forgotten a large percentage of what I learned for this time. So I’ll have to start my study all over again. But I don’t mind. The study process is fun for me.