Half-hour radio interview Sunday, July 31

I just did a half-hour radio interfview for Michigan Talk Radio.net that will air this coming Sunday, July 31 between 4:00 and 4:35 PM Eastern Time and again between 8:00 and 8:35 PM that same evening.

It was a pretty lengthy interview, running nearly half and hour before any editing, and I got to talk about my books, the current poker boom, as well as some things that I am really fond of, such as the College Poker Championships.

You'll need Real Player to listen, and all you have to do is connect to www.michigantalkradio.net to hear it.

Am I Playing Too Many Hands?

About two weeks ago, I played too many limit hold’em hands online and I made a conscious effort to tighten up, which seems to have worked quite well. When I seem to play at my best, I play about twelve percent of my hands in positions outside the blinds. Sometimes it’s a bit more than that, and occasionally it’s a little less, but usually this where my play clusters when I’m doing everything correctly.

The total percentage of hands played, including those in the blinds, is not really a meaningful figure, because it is often more dependent upon my opponents than upon me. I’ll obviously see the flop anytime I get a free play in the big blind. I’ll see a lot of flops from the small blind with decent hands for one small bet, and if I’m playing $15-$30 -- where the small blind is two-thirds of the big blind -- I’ll see the flop most of the time the cost is only an additional five dollars.

In passive games, with not much raising before the flop, I’ll see more flops than I will when the cost of playing has been elevated by aggressive raises. The number of players in a game also affects the number of hands I play. Blinds come around a lot more frequently in six-handed games than they do when it’s nine- or ten-handed, and I see a much higher percentage of hands in short handed games.

When I’m playing well, and I add the pots I’ve won at the showdown to those I’ve won without showing down the winning hand, the sum always exceeds the total number of hands shown down. My wins from showdowns added to those pots I won because I bet everyone folded is often two or three times greater than the total number of hands shown down.

If I’m showing down too many losing hands, it’s a sure sign that I’m taking hands to the river that I should have folded. It’s also a sign that I’m taking hands to from the flop to the turn that I shouldn’t have, and that I’m probably seeing more flops with hands that I shouldn’t have played in the first place. It’s a daisy chain of unplayable hands and bad decisions that culminates in losing too many hands at the showdown, and shows up in that metric as well as in the percentage of hands played outside of the blind.

If you’ve had a similar experience, let me know. I’m interested in other players’ opinions on this subject.

A recent post to the Internet newsgroup rec.gambling.poker was discussing tournament poker versus cash games, and the person positing was making the point that tournament poker is not the way to make lots of money over one's lifetime. He stated:

If tournaments were such a lucrative way to make money for touring professionals, theywouldn't need backing for one. Corporate sponsorship wouldn't be needed. Have you ever heard of cash players asking for money to be added to the pot? Why do tournament players need money added to their pot?

I chimed in with the points below:

1. Why Is Corporate Sponsorship Needed? While it may not be needed, it's certainly more desirable to play for someone else's prize pool than one you've contributed yourself. This is what makes professional golf, tennis, rodeo, and other analagous events so good for the compeititor. Their own money is not at risk; the sponsor's is.

2. Why are Tournament Players So Often Broke? Two reasons come to mind, and it seems impossible to separate out how much each factor is present in any given player's own personal equation. For starters, many players are broke because the variance in tournaments is so much greater than it is in cash games. You can play tournament poker very well for a long time and not have anything to show for your entry fee.

Addtionally, many tournament players have other leaks too. Whether it's sports betting, drugs, craps, or some combination of these and other money mismanagement problems, these proplems conspire to leech money away from a player's tournament winnings.

Just for the record, many cash game players probably have the same problems too, but you can't see it as readily because their wins and losses are not public knowledge like their tournament wins.

What are your thoughs on this topic:
1. If you're going to make a living playing poker, is tournament poker the way to go or are cash games a better avenue to pursue?
2. Do most poker players have leaks that bleed money away from their poker game?
3. What's your opinion about the possibilities of sponsored tournaments within the next five years: Do you think it will become a reality?
4. If poker tournaments were sponsored the way the PGA tour is and most or all of the prize pool was sponsor funded, would you seriously consider becoming a full-time, tourning poker tournament player?
5. If you can't see your way clear to doing this on a full-time basis, would you give tournament poker a try on a part-time basis, perhaps by playing only in local tournaments that would not require much, if any, travel or time away from your day job?

Send me your answers..........

Living Small

Earlier today I received email from a poker player who wrote:

I want to start seriously building my bankroll up. Right now I haveabout a grand in there. I have heard that saving half of what you win isa good strategy, but I have also heard just saving 10%. Do you have anyideas on what size games I should be playing. And what is the best way to increase the size of the bankroll. Thanks for your advice.


Well, it's a good question although he really didn't provide enough information in his question. For instance, I don't know if he's planning to live off his poker winnings or whether he can supplement his poker bankroll with income earned at his job.

In any event, these are hard questions to answer. If our writer does have a job he can always take some of his salary and contribute it to a poker bankroll. But if he's attempting to live and play off a $1,000 bankroll he's got a tough task ahead of him.

To play off a bankroll and make a career out of poker, andy player should probably have about 300-400 big bets -- and 600 would be better yet -- so for a $10-$20 player, which is about the minimum stakes that allow someone to support himself or herself as a professional poker player, that means $6,000-$8,000, never mind whatever money is needed to live on. Even with a 300 to 400 big bet banrkoll, without some money saved to cover living expenses, depleting playing capital to pay living expenses, particularly at the start of one's professional poker-playing career, is stressful and difficult. But someone who is playing and working at a job can tap into discretionary income to build a bankroll, and this player can get started on much less.

Taking ten percent of everything earned and paying yourself first is a great strategy for life as well as poker. But very few people do that. I've always tried to live below my means so that I could save for poker, for retirement, and for any other unexpected events that came my way. But I don't know many others who have done that. However, most every book I've ever read on financial planning advises that paying yourself first is the way to go, and that if this were to be done from an early age, it will mitigate most financial problems encountered during the course of a lifetime.

The Final Table: A View Through Binoculars

I called Amy Calistri yesterday morning to find out whether I’d missed anything by not being at the World Series of Poker and “watching” the last few days by reading the reports and live blogs online. Amy had no idea; she really couldn’t see a thing. Instead, she and many of the other journalists covering the WSOP were relying on information coming from “pool” reporters.

With a crush of media on hand, and the Rio really ill-equipped to deal with the vast hordes of reporters who were issued media passes, and Binion’s facing the challenges of being even smaller and less equipped — no wireless computer access and that sort of thing — ESPN has restricted the number of reporters who have access to the actual event. What’s happened here is a sea change of sorts that began last year when ESPN, taking notice of the World Poker Tour’s incredible popularity, decided to match their bet by putting a lot more time, money, energy, and effort into the WSOP than ever before.

While ESPN has historically reported on the World Series, it was always a one-day, one-hour sort of coverage, almost a programming afterthought. But when the WPT blew up and began garnering even more viewers in reruns than they did when their shows initially aired, ESPN saw the handwriting on the wall —a blind man wouldn’t have missed it — and bet big on poker by committing to producing a season’s worth of WSOP programming. This year they took it a step further this year by exerting even more control over the event to ensure the kind of production values needed to make their show every bit as glitzy as the World Poker Tour.

What was once really a poker tournament that just sort of happened to be filmed by ESPN is now something else entirely. The World Series of Poker, particularly its signature event: the $10,000 buy-in no-limit hold’em tournament, which has morphed into a full-fledged TV production, in which the poker itself seems to have been subsumed into the creation of an entire season of TV programming.

That’s not bad in the macro view of things. The more exposure poker gets, the more people will play our game and that’s all good. But for the reporters, bloggers, poker aficionados and serious students of the game, it makes it tough to get up close and personal in real time.

Still, with only nine players remaining and the final table set to begin today, I’m gonna be watching (I’m using that word very loosely, since I’m 275 miles away from Binion’s in Palm Springs but evidently with just as good a view, or almost as good a view, as Amy), and get my real time feeds by a combination of the reportage from the following web sites: www.cardplayer.com, www.pokerpages.com, and the incredible Pauly McGrupp’s blog at http://taopoker.blogspot.com. Pauly is a blogging fool, working seemingly without sleep for the past six weeks to bring his views and opinions of the WSOP in real time feeds, and his opinion and the color he adds to these events is masterful.

All three sites offer real time updates, with chip counts updated periodically, and the information itself is remarkably similar from one site to another — due, in large part to the “pool reporter” effect — but there are enough differences between them that it’s worthwhile to keep all three windows open in order to get some differentiation in coverage.

Six new poker millionaires were minted as of about 3:00 AM Friday, and in a few hours we’ll see who walks away with the million, who winds up with $7.5 million, and which players fall somewhere in between. Stay tuned, and go online. It’s is the best way to follow this in real time.

It's Groundhog Day at the WSOP

It’s like Groundhog Day. The movie. You know, where Bill Murray’s character faces the same day every morning, over and over again.

It’s like that here, too, with the first day of the World Series of Poker’s main event repeated three times, so that all of the nearly 6,000 entrants can play. Each day begins and ends in the wee hours of the morning the following day, when the starting flite of approximately 2,000 is winnowed down to approximately 650.

JEN'S BAD BEAT
That will fill the room once again for day two, which is actually the fourth day of play. With that many players, you’re always going to see some surprises and a number of whales have been beached on the first day of competition. But none of them in a fashion more shocking than Jennifer Harman, who made a full house on the turn, got all her money in with waaaaaay the best of it, only to lose to a straight flush on the river. How’s that for a bad beat?

WSOP LIFESTYLE SHOW, STARTREK, AND SUNGLASSES FOR LANDINGS ON JUPITER
I won’t be redundant here, since there are numerous other sites providing near real time listings of players out and those still in. More interesting to me than the mob scene that was the first day of competition was the mob scene that was the World Series of Poker Lifestyle Show, which was also held in the Rio’s convention center in a room adjacent to the tournament. Nearly 90 vendors are selling everything from poker books, to cruises, to sunglasses that are canted at an angle so you can stare down at your hole cards without the dark lens impeding your vision but your opponents can’t see your eyes at all. At $40 they are reasonably priced, but are quite eccentric looking – like something you’d want to wear if you were on Startrek and being beamed down to Jupiter.

And speaking of Startrek, I ran into Wil Wheaton who said that “Hold’em Excellence: From Beginner to Winner” was the first poker book he read and he’s happy to meet me. It still amazes me that I’ve become a celeb of sorts, even if it’s limited to the narrow world of poker, and even more amazing is that Wheaton, who is a celeb in a much broader world, is pleased and eager to meet poker folks.

The poker lifestyle show is amazing, and it shows me how wrong I’d been in my assessments of poker’s marketability all these years. I always said that magazines devoted to photography and boating will always thrive because those two activities are gear-intensive. If you are a photographer or a boater, there’s always something you want to buy, and the folks selling those somethings advertise in the magazines. But now you have about four or five new poker magazines hitting the newsstands and everyone from deodorant vendors to coin collectors to cruise companies are tying their product to poker. This show may represent the first wave on the shores of sponsored poker. Ninety vendors are here, and they are all potential sponsors of poker in one way or another. If successful, there’ll be more.

BROADCASTER'S ROW
The show is packed, and in the course of walking the showroom floor, I wind up doing four broadcast interviews, one with Rick Charles, the “Voice of Poker;” one with Bruce Martin’s “On the Felt” show; a filmed interview for “Live at the Bike;” and a filmed segment for “Poker Pages” with Amy Calistri.

WSOP BETTING ODDS
BetUSA.com has released odds on the WSOP winner. Phil Ivey and Daniel Negreanu were listed as co favorites at 300-to-1 while former champ Russ Hamilton is 2,000-to-1, as are David Williams, Tom McEvoy, Todd Brunson, Cindy Violette, the Boatman Brothers, Billy Baxter, and Vince Burgio. When the favorites are 300-to-1, they figure to win this event once in six lifetimes, assuming a 50-year poker playing career for each of them. At least according to Bet USA’s odds, it’ll be no surprise at all if Negreanu or Ivey don’t win this thing until 2305.

DOYLE BRUNSON'S UNSOLICITED $700 MILLION CASH BID FOR THE WORLD POKER TOUR
The big news on the first day is not the player standings, but the story circulating that Doyle Brunson launched an unsolicited $700 million cash bid for WPT Enterprises, Inc, which owns the World Poker Tour TV show. Brunson’s bid sent WPT shares surging by 50 percent on Nasdaq.

So what does this mean, other than the fact that a group of investment bankers see this as a moneymaking venture? I’m not sure. The company, with a market capitalization of close to $358 million — of which 70 percent is owned by Lakes Entertainment, Inc and Steve Lipscomb — would have to find additional value to ultimately justify the price paid for it. Perhaps they have ideas for new products to go along with the TV show, or maybe there’s a deal afoot to bring the WPT to a network with bigger ratings. I don’t know; I’m just speculating. But we’ll all learn more as this story develops over the next few weeks and months.

THESE ARE THE GOOD OLD DAYS
What’s significant to me is that the premium offered over WPT’s Nasdaq price speaks volumes about the optimistic view of poker, and tells me that the arc of interest in all things poker related has not even come close to peaking yet. If you’re a poker player, writer, vendor, or are in any way involved with poker as a business or a game, these are the good old days. They’re happening right before your eyes. Right now.

Back to Las Vegas

I’m on my way back to Las Vegas this Wednesday for the World Series of Poker’s main event, which I probably won’t wind up playing in unless I miraculously win my way in through a last-minute satellite, if in fact there are any spots left.

While everyone is picking their favorite, I have mine too. I’m rooting for a guy you may never have heard of, Dave Scharf — who hails from Saskatoon and was the founder of Canadian Poker Player magazine. With six-thousand players, it’s hard to say anyone is really favored, even the game’s biggest names. The field is just too big.

But I’m rooting for Dave. After all, I’ve got some money behind him, and if he wins big, so do I. Dave, in his own words, is “…an anonymous face in the crowd. You will not find my name on any sports books or anyone’s list of ‘who will make the final table.’ This is, for me, very empowering. I am not as good a player as the best … but I am good enough that if things break my way I could win. The field will be filled with players that have almost no chance to win. I am way ahead of the field and I have enough gamble in me that I could beat the “A” list players with a break or two. Luck does matter in poker and if I get an extra helping I can be very dangerous.”

Dave may be anonymous for now, but if he’s able to make a run, he will be far from unknown. After all, I think he’s the only competitor who intends to wear a kilt and that alone is something that ought to get him a few seconds air time on TV.

While I’m in Las Vegas, I’ll get over to the Wynn to check out their poker room, as well as attend a party for the Hendon Mob, and another sponsored by Royal Vegas Poker. This is a chance to kill a few birds with one stone, and I have been eager, but unable thus far, to get over to the Wynn. But I’ll take a good look at it on Wednesday.

I’m not sure really what to expect at the Wynn. I know Wynn himself is a mercurial personality, with loads of supporters as well as detractors, but when it comes to giving the public what they want in a casino, he usually has his finger right on the public’s pulse.

It’ll also be interesting to see how the media gang is holding up. Some of the bloggers such as Pauly McGrupp, who can be read on www.lasvegasvegas.com and http://taopoker.blogspot.com/, as well as Mike Paulle and Amy Calistri who are reporting for Poker Pages, have been logging incredibly long days because there are always two or three events going on simultaneously. These folks seem to get by with little or no sleep, and I’ve come to develop a lot of fondness and respect for the bloggers and anyone else logging hour after hour reporting on the WSOP.

For all of you who play the weekly "expert" tourney at Royal Vegas Poker, and look forward to winning $50, a book and a T-shirt for KOing me or any of the other experts every Wednesday, you'll have one less person to shoot for this week. I'm sure I'll miss that tournament, but I will be back online July 13, with a target firmly affixed to my back, and I hope to see you there. It's every Wednesday evening at 5:00 PM Pacific time (8:00 PM EDT) at Royal Vegas Poker