<OBJECT id=flash1 codeBase=http://active.macromedia.com/flash2/cabs/swflash.cab#version=4,0,0,0 height=47 width=570 classid=clsid
27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000>
<EMBED SRC=http://static.espn.go.com/swf/page2/story_headline.swf?subhead=Emotion%20can%20get%20the%20best%20of%20you swLiveConnect=FALSE WIDTH=570 HEIGHT=47 QUALITY=best SCALE=exactfit wmode=opaque ID=flash1 NAME=flash1 MENU=false DEVICEFONT=false FlashVars=null BGCOLOR=#FFBB00 TYPE=application/x-shockwave-flash PLUGINSPAGE=http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash></EMBED></OBJECT>By Jay Lovinger
Page 2
<!-- hasAccess this is not a premium story -->"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
According to legend, Pascal, a budding mathematical genius (he invented the first digital calculator), was driving a coach on a bridge above the Seine when the horses pulling the carriage suddenly broke away and fell to their deaths. Because the traces had been torn, the carriage remained on the bridge, though half of it hung precariously over the river far below, leaving Pascal gazing out, literally, into the abyss. At that near-death moment, Pascal had a religious epiphany and, some say, existentialist philosophy was born.
In poker terms, that's a little like sitting there with an unbeatable aces-full ... only to see your all-in opponent draw the third and fourth 8 on the turn and river to match his hole cards. If, however, you then realize that he doesn't have your stack covered -- if, in other words, you have gazed into the abyss with your tournament life in the balance, only to realize that you have survived to play more hands -- why, then, mightn't you undergo a kind of religious conversion, too?
OK, maybe not. But the point is, the human animal is a creature of emotion -- even poker-playing human animals, though all the experts and all the books tell us never to let emotion interfere with the smooth course of maximizing expected value.
Oh, if only it were that easy.
Last Wednesday, I was playing in a $100 buy-in no-limit hold 'em tournament at one of the private clubs that have sprouted up in New York City like mushrooms after a monsoon.
On the fifth hand, I was sitting in middle position, looked down and found ... two black kings. The guy in first position raised the blinds -- which were $25-25 -- to $50, a suspiciously modest move. The next two players folded, and I raised the pot to $200.
The big blind called, and the original raiser re-raised to $750.
My first thought: A-A.
And the longer I thought about it, the surer I was. Here's why:
By raising only $25 in first position and then re-raising substantially, he had, in effect, slow-played something. Now what range of hands could he possibly have slow-played in that situation? I guess, if he was insanely aggressive -- or just insane -- he could have slow-played Q-Q. Though I didn't know the guy from a hole in the ground -- I'd never played against him before, and I'd only played at this club once before (and that was in a "media" tournament promoting the Monte Carlo Millions event) -- I know that the last thing most players with Q-Q in a no-limit tournament want is a lot of people seeing the flop cheaply. What do you do with your Q-Q when an ace or a king or both hit the flop and somebody bets?
That's right -- you feel like a schmuck.
Plus, he had to figure that my raise signaled, at the very least, a medium pair or A-K. For him to raise $750 at that point with something like Q-Q would be a huge gamble. He'd have to be hoping that I was at the low end of the range of hands I could possibly be holding in that situation. I suppose there was some chance that he was one of those maniacs who just loves A-K -- though if that's what he had, the smart thing would have been to call my $200 raise and see what the flop brought.
Which left only two possibilities -- K-K or A-A. And since I was holding two of the four kings, the odds were 6-1 that I was facing ...
A-A.
Either way, of course, it's a terrible call for me to make. Because either I'm risking all my chips in hopes of splitting the pot and winning $125 (half the big blind's call and half the blinds) -- in other words, I'm putting in $1,800 more to win $125 if my one-in-seven dog comes in -- or I'm putting in $1,800 to win $4,200 as a 4-1 underdog if, in fact, he does have the aces.
Why all my chips? Because no matter what the flop brings, if I've called his $750 raise, I'm more or less committed to call his inevitable all-in post-flop bet.
So I folded, right? Well, I wish, especially since it would have been such a great laydown -- a real confidence-booster to a fledgling "poker pro."
<!---------------------INLINE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE id=inlinetable cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=3 width=200 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TH style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #000000"><CENTER>Ask Jackpot Jay!</CENTER></TH><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=284>Got a poker problem or want more details about Jay's poker adventure? Send in your questions and comments. </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------INLINE TABLE (END)--------------------->Actually, I went all-in.
Are you wondering why? So was I when, in fact, he did turn over A-A and bust me out of the tournament. Here's what I came up with: Pascal's reasons of the heart.
My head told me to fold. But my heart said, "What are you, crazy? Of all the hold 'em hands you can be dealt in the entire universe, K-K is the second best! Figure out some way not to fold."
So, first, I reminded myself of a hand I had played a few months ago in an Act III at Foxwoods. In the third hand of the tournament, I was sitting one to the right of the button, when the guy in first betting position opened for $300. It was folded around to a guy a couple of seats in front of me, who raised to $700. I looked down and found ... K-K. I decided to raise to $1,500, leaving myself with about $1,100 in chips. It was folded around to the second raiser, who quickly went all-in. I was absolutely certain, with that betting sequence, that he had to have A-A. However, I figured I was getting the right pot odds -- about 4-1 -- and I didn't want to have to play with a crippled stack.
So I called.
And, amazingly, the guy only had an A-K unsuited, which made me a 70-30 favorite. I felt like a genius, until an ace came on the flop, knocking me out of the tournament. But still, if that guy had an A-K, maybe this guy did, too ...
Also, before the tournament, I had played $1-2 no-limit hold 'em for an hour or two with some of the guys at this club; and, to put it mildly, they were extremely loose and aggressive. (This impression was confirmed by the fact that, by the fifth hand of the tournament, two of the 39 players had already been knocked out, one when a guy called an all-in bet after the turn to pull for a straight -- successfully, as it turns out.) My guy wasn't at the table, but I convinced myself that it might be some kind of peas-in-a-pod deal.
OK, then why not just call and see what the flop brought? That way, if, say, an ace came up and he bet, I could just fold and still have $1,250 -- almost two-thirds of my chips -- with which to fight back.
Nah. Talk about madness -- I convinced myself that it was important to drive out the big blind. Wouldn't want to be a 4-1 underdog and be facing a draw, too, now would we?
Plus, as Bob Woodward once infamously said when asked why he submitted Janet Cooke's series on a sub-teen "heroin addict" to the Pulitzer Prize committee when so many of his colleagues had warned him that the pieces were fabricated: "In for a dime, in for a dollar."
<!---------------------INLINE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE id=inlinetable cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=3 width=200 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TH style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #000000"><CENTER>Poker Central</CENTER></TH><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=284>Have you become obsessed with poker too? Well, no worries -- Page 2 has launched its very own poker section. Check it out. </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------INLINE TABLE (END)--------------------->Hey, the man brought down a U.S. President. If it's good enough for Woodward, it's good enough for me.
This club was a strange place -- full of young, aggressive, New York City streetwise types -- and maybe I felt a little out of place there. Maybe I missed all those comforting fellow old-timers with whom I'm used to playing at Foxwoods.
Maybe my heart was telling me that I really just wanted to go home.
Anyway, the experts and their books are clearly right -- emotion has no place in poker. But Pascal is right, too -- in all human affairs, the heart, too, must have its reasons. No matter how hard we try, no matter how unfortunate the timing might be, you never know when your emotions might jump up and bite you. And it's not just ordinary players who will be cut down by their emotions. I once saw Layne Flack, one of the best players in the world, call all-in at a final table with a K-Q when he knew knew for an absolute fact that the worst hand the raiser could possibly have had was a dominating A-something.
Yet he smiled wryly and called. Who knows why? Certainly not Layne Flack's brain.
I'm not sure what the lesson is.
Don't do it again?
Accept that these kinds of things are going to happen every once in a while -- but try to keep them to a minimum?
Embrace the "fact" that I'm not -- and will never be -- a winner, as my frequent correspondent, Maess of Minneapolis, has so eloquently explained?
"In response to your column of 10/15, I don't recall saying you are a wuss; I do recall saying you don't play to win," Maess wrote recently. "I'm sure you can see these are two very different things. You say that you are making a living player poker for the year, that you are playing to win. It is clear that you are not. In addition, much of the advice that you give is not geared to playing to win. It's as if you are writing a quaint lifestyle column, not a poker column. As a lifestyle piece, I enjoy your column. As to poker content, it's worse than Caro."
<!---------------------INLINE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE id=inlinetable cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=3 width=200 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TH style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #000000"><CENTER>Jackpot Jay's Poker Glossary</CENTER></TH><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=284>Confused by some of the terms Jay uses in his poker columns? Get their definitions right here. </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------INLINE TABLE (END)--------------------->I don't know, Maess. I'd like to think the journey to wisdom is a winding path, where every step -- and misstep -- can lead you to a successful journey's end ... at least, as long as the coach doesn't nosedive off the bridge.
Speaking of which, did you know that Blaise Pascal is also the creator of "Pascal's Wager"?
"If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing."
In poker terms, that's a little like ... oh, never mind.
COMING SOON: JACKPOT JAY GOES ONLINE
Thanks to a lot of help from my web-designer daughter Rachel, who showed me how to use the software, and her friend Dan, who sold me my first non-Mac computer and then connected it for me, I am now able to wander without a chaperone through the wonderful world of online poker. A lot more on this after I write about my adventures in the $10,000 buy-in WPT tournament at Foxwoods, which begins this coming Saturday.
HEY, IRS: HOW JAY IS DOING IN HIS NEW CAREER
Last week: lost $310
Career-to-date: plus $32,384
Jay Lovinger, a former managing editor of Life and a founding editor of Page 2, is writing on his poker adventures for ESPN.com and also writing a book for HarperCollins.
27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000><EMBED SRC=http://static.espn.go.com/swf/page2/story_headline.swf?subhead=Emotion%20can%20get%20the%20best%20of%20you swLiveConnect=FALSE WIDTH=570 HEIGHT=47 QUALITY=best SCALE=exactfit wmode=opaque ID=flash1 NAME=flash1 MENU=false DEVICEFONT=false FlashVars=null BGCOLOR=#FFBB00 TYPE=application/x-shockwave-flash PLUGINSPAGE=http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash></EMBED></OBJECT>By Jay Lovinger
Page 2
<!-- hasAccess this is not a premium story -->"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."
-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
According to legend, Pascal, a budding mathematical genius (he invented the first digital calculator), was driving a coach on a bridge above the Seine when the horses pulling the carriage suddenly broke away and fell to their deaths. Because the traces had been torn, the carriage remained on the bridge, though half of it hung precariously over the river far below, leaving Pascal gazing out, literally, into the abyss. At that near-death moment, Pascal had a religious epiphany and, some say, existentialist philosophy was born.
In poker terms, that's a little like sitting there with an unbeatable aces-full ... only to see your all-in opponent draw the third and fourth 8 on the turn and river to match his hole cards. If, however, you then realize that he doesn't have your stack covered -- if, in other words, you have gazed into the abyss with your tournament life in the balance, only to realize that you have survived to play more hands -- why, then, mightn't you undergo a kind of religious conversion, too?
Oh, if only it were that easy.
Last Wednesday, I was playing in a $100 buy-in no-limit hold 'em tournament at one of the private clubs that have sprouted up in New York City like mushrooms after a monsoon.
On the fifth hand, I was sitting in middle position, looked down and found ... two black kings. The guy in first position raised the blinds -- which were $25-25 -- to $50, a suspiciously modest move. The next two players folded, and I raised the pot to $200.
The big blind called, and the original raiser re-raised to $750.
My first thought: A-A.
And the longer I thought about it, the surer I was. Here's why:
By raising only $25 in first position and then re-raising substantially, he had, in effect, slow-played something. Now what range of hands could he possibly have slow-played in that situation? I guess, if he was insanely aggressive -- or just insane -- he could have slow-played Q-Q. Though I didn't know the guy from a hole in the ground -- I'd never played against him before, and I'd only played at this club once before (and that was in a "media" tournament promoting the Monte Carlo Millions event) -- I know that the last thing most players with Q-Q in a no-limit tournament want is a lot of people seeing the flop cheaply. What do you do with your Q-Q when an ace or a king or both hit the flop and somebody bets?
Plus, he had to figure that my raise signaled, at the very least, a medium pair or A-K. For him to raise $750 at that point with something like Q-Q would be a huge gamble. He'd have to be hoping that I was at the low end of the range of hands I could possibly be holding in that situation. I suppose there was some chance that he was one of those maniacs who just loves A-K -- though if that's what he had, the smart thing would have been to call my $200 raise and see what the flop brought.
Which left only two possibilities -- K-K or A-A. And since I was holding two of the four kings, the odds were 6-1 that I was facing ...
A-A.
Either way, of course, it's a terrible call for me to make. Because either I'm risking all my chips in hopes of splitting the pot and winning $125 (half the big blind's call and half the blinds) -- in other words, I'm putting in $1,800 more to win $125 if my one-in-seven dog comes in -- or I'm putting in $1,800 to win $4,200 as a 4-1 underdog if, in fact, he does have the aces.
Why all my chips? Because no matter what the flop brings, if I've called his $750 raise, I'm more or less committed to call his inevitable all-in post-flop bet.
So I folded, right? Well, I wish, especially since it would have been such a great laydown -- a real confidence-booster to a fledgling "poker pro."
<!---------------------INLINE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE id=inlinetable cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=3 width=200 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TH style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #000000"><CENTER>Ask Jackpot Jay!</CENTER></TH><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=284>Got a poker problem or want more details about Jay's poker adventure? Send in your questions and comments. </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------INLINE TABLE (END)--------------------->Actually, I went all-in.
Are you wondering why? So was I when, in fact, he did turn over A-A and bust me out of the tournament. Here's what I came up with: Pascal's reasons of the heart.
My head told me to fold. But my heart said, "What are you, crazy? Of all the hold 'em hands you can be dealt in the entire universe, K-K is the second best! Figure out some way not to fold."
So, first, I reminded myself of a hand I had played a few months ago in an Act III at Foxwoods. In the third hand of the tournament, I was sitting one to the right of the button, when the guy in first betting position opened for $300. It was folded around to a guy a couple of seats in front of me, who raised to $700. I looked down and found ... K-K. I decided to raise to $1,500, leaving myself with about $1,100 in chips. It was folded around to the second raiser, who quickly went all-in. I was absolutely certain, with that betting sequence, that he had to have A-A. However, I figured I was getting the right pot odds -- about 4-1 -- and I didn't want to have to play with a crippled stack.
So I called.
And, amazingly, the guy only had an A-K unsuited, which made me a 70-30 favorite. I felt like a genius, until an ace came on the flop, knocking me out of the tournament. But still, if that guy had an A-K, maybe this guy did, too ...
Also, before the tournament, I had played $1-2 no-limit hold 'em for an hour or two with some of the guys at this club; and, to put it mildly, they were extremely loose and aggressive. (This impression was confirmed by the fact that, by the fifth hand of the tournament, two of the 39 players had already been knocked out, one when a guy called an all-in bet after the turn to pull for a straight -- successfully, as it turns out.) My guy wasn't at the table, but I convinced myself that it might be some kind of peas-in-a-pod deal.
OK, then why not just call and see what the flop brought? That way, if, say, an ace came up and he bet, I could just fold and still have $1,250 -- almost two-thirds of my chips -- with which to fight back.
Nah. Talk about madness -- I convinced myself that it was important to drive out the big blind. Wouldn't want to be a 4-1 underdog and be facing a draw, too, now would we?
Plus, as Bob Woodward once infamously said when asked why he submitted Janet Cooke's series on a sub-teen "heroin addict" to the Pulitzer Prize committee when so many of his colleagues had warned him that the pieces were fabricated: "In for a dime, in for a dollar."
<!---------------------INLINE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE id=inlinetable cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=3 width=200 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TH style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #000000"><CENTER>Poker Central</CENTER></TH><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=284>Have you become obsessed with poker too? Well, no worries -- Page 2 has launched its very own poker section. Check it out. </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------INLINE TABLE (END)--------------------->Hey, the man brought down a U.S. President. If it's good enough for Woodward, it's good enough for me.
This club was a strange place -- full of young, aggressive, New York City streetwise types -- and maybe I felt a little out of place there. Maybe I missed all those comforting fellow old-timers with whom I'm used to playing at Foxwoods.
Maybe my heart was telling me that I really just wanted to go home.
Anyway, the experts and their books are clearly right -- emotion has no place in poker. But Pascal is right, too -- in all human affairs, the heart, too, must have its reasons. No matter how hard we try, no matter how unfortunate the timing might be, you never know when your emotions might jump up and bite you. And it's not just ordinary players who will be cut down by their emotions. I once saw Layne Flack, one of the best players in the world, call all-in at a final table with a K-Q when he knew knew for an absolute fact that the worst hand the raiser could possibly have had was a dominating A-something.
Yet he smiled wryly and called. Who knows why? Certainly not Layne Flack's brain.
I'm not sure what the lesson is.
Don't do it again?
Accept that these kinds of things are going to happen every once in a while -- but try to keep them to a minimum?
Embrace the "fact" that I'm not -- and will never be -- a winner, as my frequent correspondent, Maess of Minneapolis, has so eloquently explained?
"In response to your column of 10/15, I don't recall saying you are a wuss; I do recall saying you don't play to win," Maess wrote recently. "I'm sure you can see these are two very different things. You say that you are making a living player poker for the year, that you are playing to win. It is clear that you are not. In addition, much of the advice that you give is not geared to playing to win. It's as if you are writing a quaint lifestyle column, not a poker column. As a lifestyle piece, I enjoy your column. As to poker content, it's worse than Caro."
<!---------------------INLINE TABLE (BEGIN)---------------------><TABLE id=inlinetable cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=3 width=200 align=right border=0><TBODY><TR><TH style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #000000"><CENTER>Jackpot Jay's Poker Glossary</CENTER></TH><TR style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ececec" vAlign=top><TD width=284>Confused by some of the terms Jay uses in his poker columns? Get their definitions right here. </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><!---------------------INLINE TABLE (END)--------------------->I don't know, Maess. I'd like to think the journey to wisdom is a winding path, where every step -- and misstep -- can lead you to a successful journey's end ... at least, as long as the coach doesn't nosedive off the bridge.
Speaking of which, did you know that Blaise Pascal is also the creator of "Pascal's Wager"?
"If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing."
In poker terms, that's a little like ... oh, never mind.
COMING SOON: JACKPOT JAY GOES ONLINE
Thanks to a lot of help from my web-designer daughter Rachel, who showed me how to use the software, and her friend Dan, who sold me my first non-Mac computer and then connected it for me, I am now able to wander without a chaperone through the wonderful world of online poker. A lot more on this after I write about my adventures in the $10,000 buy-in WPT tournament at Foxwoods, which begins this coming Saturday.
HEY, IRS: HOW JAY IS DOING IN HIS NEW CAREER
Last week: lost $310
Career-to-date: plus $32,384
Jay Lovinger, a former managing editor of Life and a founding editor of Page 2, is writing on his poker adventures for ESPN.com and also writing a book for HarperCollins.
