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If ever you needed proof that online poker is crossing over, this was it.

An interesting quote I spotted at Bill Rini’s poker blog today, to round out my recent spat of poker-related entries:

"The only thing that separates us from animals is the fact that we can lay down middle pair to a check raise on the turn."

Hear hear.

Quad Aces make me smile. That’s me with rockets in the pocket by the way. My opponent, who had a gutshot straight draw went all in at the turn in an effort to scare me out of the hand. Since there was no straight possible with A,K,J,8 (unless he had rather foolishly called a big preflop raise with Q10), I gladly called his all-in with my (then) set of Aces.

Even with that big win under my belt, I still ended up losing this game unfortunately (I’ve been playing very badly this weekend), but the sight of those 4 cards did boost my morale quite a bit.

***

Just to kinda emphasize how horribly I’ve been performing: A few hours later, I drew quad Kings twice in the same game, and still only managed to make second place. Geez, what does it take, man?

I just did a Tournament History request over at PokerStars, and got some interesting results. Of the past 46 games I’ve played, I’ve finished in the money 13 times, including 5 first-place finishes, 4 in second place and 4 in third. Since I’ve played nothng but cheapie $3 buy-in games, we can do the math quite simply as …

profit = (46 games * $3 per game) - ( (5 * $15 for 1st place) + (4 * $9 for 2nd place) + (4 * $6 for 3rd place) )

… which, believe it or not, comes out to exactly $3 whole dollars. This is depressing and eye-opening at the same time, because even with a win-rate of approximately 1 in 3.5 games, I have just barely broken even.

Last night, I played an (offline) live game with friends and actually found myself a bit put off by the fact that there were now real faces in front of me, instead of the usual graphical avatars at PokerStars. I think the big advantage of online play is that there are fewer distractions: instead of pretending you have the ability to read your opponents’ facial ticks, you can focus purely on the game itself, i.e., the odds, the strategy, and interpreting your opponents’ moves.

I placed third at that game, which was decent considering that one of the newer players was riding the river like you wouldn’t believe. (Of course, unlike online play, we only reward 1st and 2nd place at our home games, so finishing third has no real bearing one way or the other.)

One of the things I’ve been really learning is to stop playing marginal hands. Of course the definition of "marginal" wasn’t really obvious to me until very recently. Basically you want to only be playing pocket pairs greater than 4/4, and suited cards A/10 or higher. Everything else just go straight into the muck unless a) I have the biggest or second biggest stack, or b) there are only 4 or fewer players remaining. So far this has worked really well for me, as it allows me to stick around a lot longer than most people. The drawback is that I inevitably spend alot of time watching from the sidelines as I wait for decent cards, so it can get fairly boring.

The other thing I’ve been learning is how to make decisions based on your position. You could state this idea very succinctly as: the later your position is, the better. So the guy on the button has a very big advantage over his opponents because he gets to see what they’re up to before he has to act. The implication is that players in late position can get away with playing a bit more loosely because there’s less risk that someone will raise behind them. On the other side of that equation, early position players have to be a lot more careful when betting speculative hands because there are as many as 7 other players queued up behind you, and any one of them could have a hand that trounces yours.

So, as an example: I would not play Q/J offsuit from an early position unless I had a really solid read on the entire table. I would probably call with it in a middle position, and I would probably raise with it in late position (assuming everyone ahead of me folded; otherwise I’d just call).

There are tons of other things that I still have yet to learn — how to compute pot odds quickly and how to deduce your opponents’ hand possibilities and bet accordingly, for example — but so far, understanding those two things above have been enough to keep my ass in the running throughout most of my online games.

My total online poker winnings has just topped $80, owing to the fact that I’ve won 4 out of the past 5 games I’ve played in (three 1st place finishes, and one 3rd place). I’m hoping this isn’t just some weird lucky streak, as I am starting to seriously consider devoting more regular time to this. I’ve started to get a very good feel for strategy (it helps that most of the people playing these low-end tables are sheep) so if your lifestyle isn’t too extravagant, you could, in theory, survive by playing poker 8 hours a day … especially in this country.

Each game takes about 30-45 minutes to play fully, so it’s highly possible for a seasoned player to play 30 games a day … probably way more than that if they can handle multiple simultaneous games. If you apply the win-ratio from my last 10 games (I’ve won cash in 7 out of 10), a dedicated person could take in about US$300 a day. A lot of poker pros began their careers by playing online so much that it became an all-consuming occupation, including my all-time favorite player Iain "Tillerman" Girdwood, of Starcraft fame.

Obviously I don’t have that kind of time available, but if I played 2-3 games daily on weekdays and 5-6 games on weekends, it’s totally possible to be generating about US$180 a week. Of course, the cost to enter those 20-25 games would be nearly US$75, so you’re really only looking at $100 profit. Even so, that is well over the national average wage, and not bad for what is essentially a recreational hobby. I’m never seriously going to give up the whole web dev career thing, but it’s nice to know there are other ways to extract money from this world.

I’ve played a total of 17 ten-player tables in the past 5 days over at PokerStars and have a total record of one 1st place finish, one 2nd place, and one third place. The buy-in per game is $3 (+ $0.40 to the "dealer"), so I’ve invested a total of $57.80, and won $30 ($15, $9 and $6 for each of my top 3 finishes). Due to the buy-in/reward ratio, I need to win at least 1 out of every 5 games I play in, in order to actually turn a profit. My current success rate is about 1 in 8.5, which is admittedly still pretty far out.

I’m finally beginning to understand what it takes to win these things, owing to some no-limit hold ‘em strategy videos I saw over at ThePokerBay. The overall technique is based around patience, and a folding rate of around 90%. Yes, that means that in a game of 40-50 hands, you will generally play only 5, folding everything else. This explains why professional online players can manage 6 games simultaneously, because more often than not, all they need to do is click the "FOLD" button and move on to the next table.

I doubt I can hit the magic 1:5 win rate without putting a whole lot more time and effort into this, but it certainly is nice to try. 

I’m currently 15 minutes away from participating in my very first online poker tournament at PokerStars, which is something I’ve been planning for the past month. Being a cheapskate, I looked for the cheapest tournament I could enter (a No-limit Texas Hold ‘Em event with a measley $3.30 buy-in). I must say I’m pretty excited. So far, 500 other players have registered, and my modest goal is to at least make it past the top 60 cut-off point. I don’t really expect to win big, but I’d like to think that I have what it takes to at least finish with a bit more money than it cost me to play.

The champion of an event of this size gets 21.75% of the total prize pool, which would be around US$330. Not that I’m saying that would be me, of course, but it sure is nice to dream.

I haven’t participated in any kind of live competition since my Magic: The Gathering days, a game which I was only marginally good at (I did make it to the finals of 3 tournaments, and took home some small prizes though). Will update this entry as play progresses.

UPDATE #1

Ok, we’re at our first 5-minute break, and about half of the field of 794 players has already been eliminated. I was a bit overwhelmed during the first few hands and proceeded to lose 1/3 of my chips to bad calls. Thankfully, I made one big all-in that allowed me to bounce back. I’m nowhere in the top 100 at this point, but I’m still playing, so that’s something I guess.

I got moved to a different table after the first 20 minutes, and am currently the short stack, after mistaking a check-raise for weakness. The limits have gone up twice already (currently at 50/100) and I’ve only got about 1,600 to my name. I don’t know if I’ll be able to hit my goal with this tourney, but it’s been incredibly exciting so far :)

UPDATE #2

Well, I’ve been eliminated at 187th place, still quite a ways away from the 127th-place bubble. It turns out that the winner of the tournament takes home a hefty US$500, which is pretty decent all things considered. I’m going to try again just as soon as I have a chance, as this was some of the most fun I’ve had online since Starcraft :)

I’ve been playing Texas Hold ‘Em Poker online like mad these past couple of days, partly because I’ve been sick (and thus, unable to leave the house) and partly because it’s one of the few games I can play while "working," and wouldn’t you know it, playing online is totally different from playing in real life.

The most obvious difference is that you will likely be using play money if you’re just starting out. I’ve only played at CardPlayerPoker and PokerStars, but I imagine it works in generally the same fashion at the other providers: basically, you’re given 1000 chips upon sign up, with which you can join any of the play-money games (there are usually over a thousand games running concurrently, so you’ll never have trouble finding a spot). All your winnings become part of your bankroll, and you can use them to join bigger and bigger games (although still within the play-money zone). In case you lose your chips completely, they’ll be automatically refilled so you can play again. Sounds like a great deal? Well, sorta.

The play-money dynamic makes No-Limit Hold ‘Em a bit weird, to say the least. For one thing, nobody is afraid of an all-in. I’ve seen people join tables and just go all-in every round, hoping to catch a miracle flop (fortunately, you can only bankrupt yourself up to 3 times per hour, so annoyances like this will inevitably self-destruct). The other major difference is that about 80% of all the players that joined pre-flop will see the river, even those with the slimmest drawing hands. This means you have to be aware of even the least likely of possibilities, and bet accordingly. (This evening, for example, my Queen-high flush got trounced by a 6-10 straight flush; how often does that happen in real life?)

It took me two days of going bankrupt every 15 minutes before I figured out how to play at a decent level online. The annoying thing is that the stuff I’ve learned is unlikely to be useful in the real-life games I play with my friends every weekend. But here they are anyway, because it’s fun to list these things down:

1) Play stupid. Don’t make big raises and expect people to get scared and fold. Don’t attempt to get someone to "bet into" you, because chances are, they’re holding better cards. Don’t take checking as a sign of weakness; most of the time, they just do it because everybody else is doing it.

2) Don’t make big raises, even when you’ve got the nuts or premium cards in the pocket. The blinds are normally at 5 and 10, so anything over a hundred is a fairly large raise, especially pre-flop. The idea is to keep the game steady. When you’re playing online, tilts start at the click of a mouse, and you don’t want to set anyone off and then have everyone join in. The reason why you don’t need to raise is because you will make a decent profit just by getting everyone to call (because nearly everyone will join each round), which brings me to my next point:

3) Join each round. Play everything you get, even the 2&7’s. However, only do this if you followed rule #1 and #2 to the letter. Because nobody is raising, and because you are making small bets, it doesn’t hurt to lose 10-30 chips to see a flop and/or a turn. Obviously, you’ve got to know when to quit as well, but I’ve won some really huge pots with the worst hands that just magically morphed into trips or full-houses over the course of the round. As long as you’re only burning a small amount of money with the wasted rounds, it’s alright, because the payoffs tend to be really big as well.

4) Don’t look for tricks. This one was the hardest idea for me to get rid off. Generally, you want to treat every bet as a genuine one unless you are up against an obviously stupid player. If someone bets heavily after the flop, you should take that to mean that he hit something. Don’t waste money trying to catch bluffs because other people will do that for you (almost) automatically.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of others ways to confuse your opponent than by bluffing, and this is why this rule is tricky to follow. Checking when you have the nuts is something I see a lot of, for example, as well as quietly calling after a big raiser every round. So although you can rest assured that bluffers will be caught, slow-players will often get right by you. The good news is that if you pay attention to rules #1 and #2, misreading the occassional slow-player will rarely cost you the game.

And lastly, the most important lesson I’ve learned from playing online, which coincidentally serves to highlight yet another way that the internet-based game is different from my real-life one: 

5) If you don’t like the table, leave. There are literally thousands more out there for you to choose from.

Regarding yesterday’s post about that US$60M poker tournament in Melbourne next year — I seem to have misunderstood exactly how the televised tournament will work. According to Gambling Magazine:

The players will have to ante-up $10m to buy into the match, due to be televised around the world through the Fox Sports Network in the United States and other networks in Europe and Asia, Crown chief operating officer Richard Longhurst said.

I had to re-read that sentence several times before I believed it. It certainly whittles down the list of players who could possibly join, considering that even Phil Helmuth himself, who has won 9 WSOP bracelets during his career, has earned less than US$4 million total. 2004’s world champion Greg Raymer has  total lifetime earnings amounting to a bit more than US$5 million, and this year’s Joseph Hachem has US$7.5 million. Neither of the two have the same amount of experience as Helmuth though, and if either of them were at a table with him, they’d be stomped flat.

But sweet jesus, is this for real? I mean, if we were just talking straight-up odds, ponying up $10m for a 5:1 shot at $60m is pretty favorable, but only if you totally ignore the fact that that money is enough to totally bankrupt any of those 5 inevitable losers.

Crazy, I tell you.

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Six players will compete in a winner-take-all $60 million US televised poker tournament next summer.

Fox Sports Net and Mansionpoker.net reached agreement on a three-year deal Monday, with the pots growing to $75 million in 2007 and $100 million in 2008 for the one-day competitions at the Crown Casino in Melbourne, Australia.

Oddly-enough, the "world’s biggest payday" will be an invitational-style tournament, with barely enough players to make a full table. This has all the makings of an over-the-top Hollywoodized (or in this case, Fox-ized) production to me, although that won’t keep me from watching like the rest of the enrapt masses.

The only player mentioned in the article is Phil Ivey (affectionately known as the Tiger Woods of poker … or i really should say, Tiger Woods is the Phil Ivey of golf). I’d just be guessing about the rest of the table but I think it’s fairly safe to assume that Phil Helmuth will be there as well. The trouble with these heavily-covered events is that usually the media will dictate which players will be invited to play simply based on their respective images, and not necessarily their playing ability. So we’d probably have Jennifer Harman (so they won’t say poker is a man’s game), maybe Scotty Nguyen/Johnny Chan (so they won’t say poker is a white man’s game), maybe Doyle Brunson (so they won’t say poker is a young man’s game), and maybe Phil Laak (so they won’t say poker is a smart man’s game).

I’d love to get players like Mike Matusow, Chris Ferguson or Allen Cunningham in there, because I know they’d make for a really interesting game, but with only six seats and so many demographics to represent, these guys’d probably be second-choice alternates at best.