Poker Pros Comment on Data Mining
If you haven’t been following the world of high-stakes online poker lately let me catch you up on the latest drama. Well known poker pro Brian Townsend was recently suspended from one of the online card rooms he frequents after he admitted to participating in data mining poker information on a potential opponent. Data mining is basically when someone extracts info from a database, which in poker’s case means getting a hold of hand histories.
Townsend revealed that he used software tools to gather approx 30,000 hands from a third-party source in order to prepare for an upcoming match with “Isildur1”, the online poker pro that has every high-stakes player foaming at the mouth to play him. Townsend received a 30-day suspension from the site and as a result a number of top online pros have chimed in with their two cents, with some talking to pokernews.com, as to the ethical use of data mining, considering that it is deemed illegal by practically all of the major online card rooms.
Andrew Robl
"What Brian did, although against the T&C, is a relatively small offense. He could have acquired the same information merely by opening the tables and watching the other matches Islidur1 played. He should be punished since he violated the T&C, but whether it should be in the T&C in the first place is definitely up for debate. I personally think this whole issue is being blown way out of proportion. In football, is it an unfair advantage for teams to watch tape of the games their opponents had played the previous week?"
Ryan Fisler
"I personally think it's a joke that Townsend gets a slap on the wrist, when it's far from his first offense. If anybody else had the previous offenses he had, then got caught with this, they would probably be banned. Double standards are never a good thing."
David Chicotsky
"I think this is minor compared to the previous offense that Townsend got suspended for - playing on other accounts!"
Annie Duke
"This reminds me of some of the stuff with imper1um. Just because you can do something online does not mean it is okay. I have heard arguments about account buying that since it is easy to do and relatively undetectable that it should be allowed. Of course, this is very fuzzy thinking. If (the poker site) has a clear rule against what Hastings and Townsend did then Hastings and Townsend are in the wrong, regardless of whether it is easy to do with the data or hard to detect. They signed the same ULA we did and, especially as Red Pros, they should be following the posted rules of the site."
Feeding Off the Holiday Tourists
Poker enthusiasts that play poker for the sake of trying to win money put a lot of time into finding games with inexperienced players that won’t guard their money as closely as others. This is why you’ll see a lot of individuals jumping from table to table in a card room, what they’re doing is trying to find the best table to sit at, a game full of easy money. The best time to find novice-level poker players is on the weekend as typically only the hardcore players hit the cash games during the week. However, the holiday season brings in a rush of tourism that results in card rooms filling with poker hobbyists that are just excited at the chance of playing. This is when its time to enter the waters with the rest of the local sharks.
Sometimes these poker tourists can be hard to spot, but other times not so much. Look for clothing and personalities that just don’t match with the usual demeanor of the card room. Most California natives aren’t going to wear head to toe Green Bay Packer gear, plus you can normally glean a lot of information about where someone is from if you’re the talkative type that has no problem starting a conversation at the table. Now don’t expect to find half a dozen of these players at your table, all you’re trying to do is find where the loose/unskilled money in your game is.
Now of course this isn’t to say that all out of town poker players are bad, but you will definitely notice the influx of those with inferior skills during the holiday travel season. Don’t feel bad about taking their money, they’ve already set foot in the casino. If anything you’ll be helping them lighten their pockets so that they don’t spend too much on the dumb items at the card room gift shop.
Schedule Announced for the World Series of Poker 2010
The most prestigious tournament series in the world has announced the schedule for the 2010 World Series of Poker. The 41st annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas is set to run from May 27-July 17, 2010. It is the only tournament series that awards the coveted gold bracelet signifying the best poker champions in the world. The series attracts players from all over the world. In 2008 it was named the 7th most admired sports brands in North America.
This year there have been a few changes to the tournament set up, and all changes appear to be positive ones. In the past, players have had to endure long hours which can be taxing on anyone’s play. This year tournaments that start at 12 noon are expected to play a maximum of10-one hour levels, and 5 p.m. starts will play a maximum of 8 one-hour levels. This will give players the opportunity to get adequate sleep for the next day’s start. Tournaments will have the same structure of starting chips as last year which provided triple the buy in amount in starting chips. The $25k 6-Handed No-Limit event will be a new event added. The Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino has advocated its entire convention center to the WSOP this year.
For more information on events, buy-ins, starting times and structures visit www.wsop.com.
Twas the night before Christmas
photo by flipchip • lasvegasvegas.com
Happy Holidays from the Rio Resort Las Vegas
The Night Before Christmas in the Poker Room
Twas the night before Christmas and all through the poker room,
Not much was moving, quiet as a tomb,
The chip racks were stacked on the side in a row,
Hoping some good luck would fill them with dough;
The players were sitting hunched in their seats,
Telling their tales of all the bad beats,
The dealer looked at me and asked,
Do you plan to bet or will you pass?
From out in the casino I heard a shout,
I jumped from the two seat to see what was about,
And what to my surprise did appear,
A fat guy drinking a bottle of beer,
He came into the room all in a bustle,
No one guessed it might be a hustle,
He slid into the six seat and yelled for a rack,
Looked around and said, "I'll leave when I've filled my sack,"
Through the air the cards did fly,
Lady Luck loved this red suited guy,
He played every hand never folding a one,
The outcome was always the same, he won and won,
When he had taken most of our chips,
He said I'm going to give you some poker tips,
I've played them all, the good and the great,
And let me tell you I can relate,
I've sat across from Hellmuth, Brunson and Chan,
Hachem, Reese, even a guy called Fossilman,
They remind me of a boxer with a glass jaw,
They can't even play me to a draw,
Now please excuse me, I really must go,
I got to make a stop at the Bellagio,
I left my Mercedes in their valet,
Don't look so surprised, I traded that drafty sleigh,
I hope you all have a very prosperous year,
I'll be back next Christmas to play poker right here,
Maybe you should read a poker book or two,
The way you play you don't have a clue,
Under you're pillow tomorrow you must look,
That's where I'll leave your copy of Doyle Brunson's poker book,
And with that he turned, shouting as he walked away,
Have a Very Merry Christmas Day!
Happy Holidays!
photo by flipchip • lasvegasvegas.com
Bellagio's festive 2009 holiday lobby
Juggling University and Poker
Over the years I have watched several of my friends quit school and come to Vegas with dreams of making it big as a poker player. Some end up going back home within a few months after going broke, and others are better able to withstand the test of time. I am lucky enough to have lived the dream of playing poker in Vegas while going to college, but it was near impossible to do both successfully.
I never had a doubt that I would go to college, but by the time I was a sophomore at the University of Nevada Las Vegas I wondered if it was really worth it to finish. By the end of my sophomore year I had graduated from playing the college dorm cash games, to playing 4-8 limit in the casinos, to 2/5 NL at Bellagio. By the beginning of my Junior year, I was playing 5/10 NL Hold’em at Bellagio, and traveling all over the world to places like Germany, Amsterdam, and Africa. Money wasn’t an issue at the time because the games were soft enough that a good player could consistently beat the game. However, the long sessions and inconsistent hours really started to hinder my ability to make it to class.
One by one, over the course of a year, I would drop all of my classes. Some days I wouldn’t make it to class because I had just gotten off of a 32 hour session and was just too exhausted. Other days the game was too good to leave and I’d miss my lecture. It was apparent that poker had taken priority in my life. Some of my younger poker buddies would encourage the behavior saying, “Why do you need to go to school when you’re making so much money playing?” My older, wiser, counterparts would always tell me that I should finish school because poker would always be there. It was easy to blow off the latter when I felt like the money was going to continue rolling in. As with all good things, they must come to an end.
After a year of traveling, playing poker, and spending money like it grew on trees, a hard reality set in. Playing poker wasn’t always going to be so easy. By the end of the year, the economy took a dive. The games around Vegas became harder, as fewer and fewer people were donating their money to the poker table instead of black jack. A more savvy poker crowd emerged with the tank scarce of fish. It became common to play at a table with eight local pros; each of us targeting the one tourist like sharks ready to feed. Each of us were trying to stay out of each other’s way on the felt, even though it was vertically impossible with so many of us packed on one table. Then for two straight months I started running bad, which led to playing bad, which led to brankroll strains. To make matters worse, some major investments I made were failing. It was time to reassess my play.
After a great deal of thought, I decided that the best thing I could do for my future was to finish school. Education is the one thing that no one can take away from you. Also, if I were to ever go broke, it is a lot easier to build a bankroll back with a college degree than to build a bankroll flipping burgers. I knew that poker would have to take a back seat to school if I ever wanted to get through it.
The first semester of my senior year wasn’t very hard, so I was able to play a fair amount of cash game to supplement my living. My last semester was different. I had some intense classes which hindered me from playing very much. I bit the bullet and finished my last semester without playing much poker. I was living off of my bankroll, so it was tough to keep my new priorities in order while I watched my accounts dwindle down. However, it was all worth it when I finally graduated in December 2009.
Now that it is over, I am quickly reacquainting myself with poker. I’ve already made a final table in a WPT event at the Bellagio, and I’m planning on a great poker 2010. So what was the point of going to school if I just plan on playing poker? Security. Successful people plan for the future and protect their assets. Education is an asset and if there is ever a day I need to do something besides poker I’ll have the tools to do it. For anyone wavering on the idea of quitting school to pursue a poker career I would have to tell them to finish school first. You could always play poker online or plan a vacation to play in Vegas live. The opportunity to go to school might not always be there, so take advantage of it when you are young. Thankfully my older, wiser poker pals were right. Poker will always be there and Las Vegas will always have a poker game going.
PokerStars looks to break record again
PokerStars is aiming to break their own Guinness World record (again) for the most amount of players in a poker tournament.
They beat Full Tilt in July with 65,000 players, and in a few days they hope to surpass even that.
The landmark date is Dec. 27 at 11:45 a.m. (Vegas time), the cost is only $1, and $300,000 is guaranteed. First place is guaranteed $50,000. Not bad for a buck.
As of this writing, almost 47,000 players have signed up, so keeping pace looks likely they'll achieve a new record. But even if they just tie at 65,000, that leaves a decent overlay of $235,000. Are they really hoping for 300,000 players, and during Christmas break? Would the server crash under that load?
The tournament ID is 234567890 (easy enough to remember).
We're a sucker for a cheapo tourney, so we'll see you there.
P.S. While looking at the tournaments, we caught a $5,000 freeroll that anyone can sign up to. It's tomorrow, Dec. 24 at 1:15 p.m. (Vegas time) and a whopping 105,000 players are in that one. It's a hyper-turbo tourney, so blinds go up much faster than a regular tournament. Tourney ID is 224296990. We signed up to that one too.
Weekly SNG Tip: The Little Things
I’ll be honest, there’s really no magical secret when it comes to dominating SNG games. Normally good hand selection compiled with correct bet sizes and a basic understanding of advanced strategy will propel you into the money in the softer single table tournaments. This isn’t to say though that you can’t give yourself an edge as much as possible, especially when it comes to the little things that happen in a match that may go unnoticed by other players.
When you’re playing in a live game at a brick & mortar casino/card room, you have the ability to pick up on visual tells and cues from the other players, a tool that is sorely missed when playing online. However, there are a number of telltale signs that many of your opponents will do without knowing/caring that can tip you off to the weakness/strength of their hand.
Remember that a lot of players will play SNG tournaments while other participating in another activity, whether it’s just surfing the internet, eating dinner, or multi-tabling numerous poker games at once. When someone isn’t completely focused on that one sole SNG table they’re going to act very robotically in their decisions. What you’ll want to look out for is players that check often and check quickly. This is a sign that they glanced up from their sandwich and had no interest in continuing to be in the hand. Players that exhibit this behavior will be of a low risk factor when it comes to trapping you, which means if you get into a heads-up situation with them you can bet regardless of whatever your hand is, as you will likely win the pot right there since they are playing with carelessness and predictability.
Another little sign of weakness is when players talk a lot about their decisions in the chat box. Experienced players often could care less about writing down their thoughts for the rest of the table to read as they want to protect that information and not give their opponents any type of edge. However, inexperienced yet bullish beginners will love to post things like “You must have AK, right?” in the chat box, which more often than not is them signaling that they don’t have a lot of confidence in their hand. Deceptive players may use the chat box to try and confuse others, but those opponents are few and far between.
Must online tells come the way of repetition and lack of focus. Spend a little extra time trying to predict your opponent’s actions and you’ll start to see a pattern emerge, giving you very valuable information to aid in your decision making.
2009 Poker Humor Roundup
Poker, in general, is not really the humor breadwinner of the sports world. Sure we might get the occasional chuckle out of a Daniel Negreanu-delivered Scotty Nyguen impression, but that momentary brilliance is quickly buried alive by the often failed one-liners doled out in mass quantities from dry humor specialists like Norman Chad and Gabe Kaplan, who still think its hip to serve up jokes that were popular long before the majority of poker players were even born.
Humor at the table isn’t all that stellar either. Phil Ivey often looks like he’s ten minutes into a hypnosis experiment, and Mike the Mouth continues to fail at grasping at the difference between people laughing with you versus people laughing at you. Still, there certainly exists some element of funny stories and moments from around the poker community and I’ve taken the time to compile some of the more entertaining snippets that you may enjoying browsing through while waiting for your SNG to start.
Okay, while none of these are LOL funny, it gets the same chuckle out of me as when I see Phil Hellmuth playing dress up while prepping for a WSOP Main Event entrance. The first image shows you what life as a degenerate gambler would be like (though personally I could always ask any one of my Italian uncles), and ends with a Tony G look-alike losing at strip poker, in case you ever wanted to experience a living nightmare.
2. Clonie Gown vs. Howard Lederer: Bollywood Style
This one’s good for a quick laugh. The gang over at PokerJunkie.com use some old Bollywood footage to attempt to recreate what was likely a conversation between female poker pro Clonie Gowen when she took aim at online card room Full Tilt Poker concerning contract disputes. All that’s missing now is a traditional Bollywood group dance scene with Erik Seidel, Jennifer Harman and the rest of the Full Tilt crew.
Someone here took the time to act out what many would consider to be an impossible scenario, quad aces beaten by a royal flush. The hand is played out from the perspective of the player who holds pocket aces, flops a set, and continues to bet his most prized possessions on every street, all the way to where he bets his whole life once he makes quad aces on the river. He gets called and happily turns over his hand, but then devastation sets in when the other player shows a royal flush. When I watched this I figured it was a good, funny look at how we all should gamble responsibly, though such a hand could never happen in real life. Right?
4. Quad Aces loses to Royal Flush
When I first saw the title of this video pop up I thought for sure that it was going to be the same film that I had just watched. Nope. Just take a look at the face of the poor shmuck that couldn’t wait to get all his money into the middle of the pot with quad aces, only to have his opponent flip up a royal flush for the win. Yeah, that’s as real as it gets. Oh, and did I mention that this hand was played at the WSOP and ended up knocking the guy out of the tournament? We all have a bad beat stories, but that dude may be the first to have a tale to tell that involves quad aces getting cracked at the biggest poker series on the planet. Maybe I should write up an instructional piece on how to check down four aces just to be safe.
The title alone is intriguing, that is as long as Gavin Smith and Barry Greenstein aren’t listed as the hosts. The Naked Poker News is a UK-based site that appears to be in the beta stages of what will eventually become a poker news program where naked girls deliver industry-related stories. Not sure how a pair of bouncing boobs is going to make a story on Jamie Gold’s latest charity tournament any more relevant, but I’m not one to get in the way of progress.
More $1k Events Offered at the 2010 WSOP
The 2010 World Series of Poker is offering eight events for an affordable $1,000 buy-in. Six of the events will be No Limit Texas Hold’em open to anyone who wishes to play. This is a wonderful change in previous schedules for those who are looking for affordable buy-ins while still being able to take part in these prestigious events. Players will also have a chance at a World Championship gold bracelet in each of these events. The WSOP also offers higher buy-ins that range from $1,500 to $50,000.
In previous years the smallest buy-ins was $1,500, and the only $1k events were the Ladies event and the Seniors event. The 2009 WSOP added a $1k Stimulus Event which proved to be extremely popular. It was the largest live event outside of the Main Event with a sold out crowd of 6,012 entrants. Steve Sung took first in the 2009 Stimulus Event winning $771,338.
The first $1k event will be held on May 29th. Each of these events will be four day events with two starting days. Players will start out with 3,000 chips, and all levels will be 60 minutes. The tournament structure is decent with blinds starting out at 25/25, and breaks after every two levels. It is recommended that anyone who wishes to take part in these events sign up early to avoid getting shut out. Players can pre-register now or get more information on the tournaments by visiting the WSOP website.
Eric Baldwin Takes 2009 Player of the Year
Eric Baldwin snagged Card Player’s Player of the Year award for 2009. After winning over 1.2 million in tournaments in 2009 alone, it is no wonder why he has been named this year’s winner. Baldwin made 17 final tables and took down four tournament titles. His latest win was the Bellagio Five Diamond $1,000 NL Hold’em rebuy tournament. After a successful year, he accumulated 6,994 player of the year points which was over 200 more points than 2008 POY winner John Phan had.
Below are the standings for the POY 2009:
1. Eric Baldwin- 6,994
2. Cornel Cimpan- 5,934
3. Yevgeniy Timoshenko- 5,509
4. Vitaly Lunkin- 4,473
5. Soheil Shamseddin- 4,283
6. Jason Mercier- 4,130
7. Brock Parker- 3,772
8. Joseph Cada- 3,600
9. Mike Leah- 3,497
10. Angel Guillen- 3,492
Eric Baldwin is a 26 year old professional poker player who grew up in Beaver Dam, WI. He went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where he got a degree in psychology with a minor in mathematics. In 2005, he played right field for the UW-Whitewater collegiate baseball team which won the Division III National Championship.
He recently moved to Las Vegas, NV to concentrate on poker full time. He won his first World Series Of Poker bracelet in 2009 in the $1,500 No Limit Hold’em tournament which paid $521,932. Year to date, he has had 93 tournament cashes, ten 1st place finishes, and over $2.6 million in tournament wins.
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WSOP Info is your source to online poker news and information regarding the WSOP 2008. The World Series Of Poker is the largest Poker event in the world.
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