Dear Mr Rastafish,

1. Who is your favourite DDT dealer and why?

2. In my experience, typical players assess the dealer on his/her abilities to give them good cards and their opponents slightly worse cards. The proper assessment of course is how well the dealer does their job properly: distributing cards, accuracy, efficiency, speed, how often they make errors, their demeanour/attitude, refraining from extraneous conversation with players, refraining from strategy discussion, neutrality, confidence, service, focus, ability to control players courteously, handling of awkward/irregular poker table situations etc. My second question is thus. Ignoring the 'gives me good cards' factor, what does The Fish look for in a dealer in a professional sense that makes the dealer in The Fish's wise mind a good dealer?

3. Any comments on DDT dealers/floorpersons in general also welcome. Any things you think could be improved upon?

4. What nicknames do you have for each dealer?

5. Do you think you will ever get into playing other poker variants such Omaha, Stud or Draw and their High/Low or Lowball counterparts? What experience, if any, do you have with other variants and betting structures (fixed limit, pot limit, spread limit) alternative to no limit?

Sincerely yours,
Giraffe Neck.

PS

Sorry about flipping over your mucked hand that time in that cash game, it was truly involuntary, I have no interest in your hand as a dealer unless you turn it over to lay claim to a pot! Please don't Kill me!

APAT.

Reason: Fixed Limit Seven Card Stud Tournament
Also: PLO

I may be the only man in a 50 mile radius under 25 who is ecstatic for fixed limit poker and non holdem games, but that doesn't stop me from promoting them! Stud is a fantastic and highly situational game for tournament poker due to gradually increasing stakes and antes from the very beginning and upcards constantly changing starting hand values. Many complain that fixed limit games are slow and complicated, yet there is no need to think about bet size, only the right action, CHECK or BET, or RAISE, CALL, or FOLD. The hands move faster, not slower, and there is a lot of action due to the large size of the pot vs the small size of the bets

Get involved!!!

Tommy Angelo is the nuts. Both books A+

Also check out his The Eightfold Path To Poker Enlightenment which is a DeucesCracked series. Poker + Buddhism = Profit.

Hi all,

      First proper post apart from my profile questions. I normally play the £25 freezouts at dusk till dawn but tonight the other half is off work so I have to find a venue for tomorrow night instead. The £50 turbo sounds tempting tomorrow night but I think im going to play the cash games at DTD. It will only be the 0.5/1 due to my bankroll being low but i was wondering if £50 pounds for the cash games would be enough or a waste of time?

 Cheers

I know you need to get out of the house but playing online is the better bet for someone with a low bankroll. There are cash games much lower than .50/1 where you can have 100 bigs with less money. If you are thinking of buying in for £50 on a .5/1 that tells me that figure is at a push, you'd prefer to risk less but you'd rather not have less than 50 big blinds. It feels to me like if you lost five bullets if you could tolerate that, you wouldn't be able to or would be scared to reach for more. IMO in NL Holdem you need to be able to tolerate big swings because on any given day you can play perfectly and lose five bullets no problem.

Officially I should welcome you to our live cash games. But IMO check out our online site's lower stakes cash as a priority. I can tell you from experience, failing some serious luckboxing, if you play above your roll you will eventually lose it all, and without money there is no poker for you.

Remember:
From tiny acorns great oaks grow.

[hEV]

hEV

I've been thinking about this concept for ages now, but finally been pushed over the edge to write it up following two hands I played on the bubble of the LAPT Medellin side event and this brilliant blog from Phil Galfond which can be found here http://www.philgalfond.com/quick-update-fake-math-and-my-philosophy-on-being-a-logical-poker-player/

This blog confirmed a whole bunch of things I'd felt throughout my first two years as a poker pro, but goes against a lot of what I'd been taught in the past and I've always felt like some of the ideas are dumb or silly.

OK so we're on the pure bubble, 17 left, 16 paid. It's my last tournament in Colombia before I go off travelling. I've bricked the first two, so no cashes yet. It's a ~£750 buyin, I have 100% of myself. I think this is one of the most £ I've ever put in to a tournament before. I remember putting in £1k to play EPT Campione and selling the rest, and similar for IPT San Remo but I'd always been staked into stuff like this before, but since going on my own I reckon this is the biggest "punt" I've done. It's about the line to be honest, decided not to sell because it's just so so soft here, and I'd get flamed for the mark-up I feel I'd be worth!

So that's the setting and it causes me to make 2 what I would call "pussy folds". Now bear in mind that I'm definitely on the spewy side rather than nitty generally in my game, so both folds for some would be totally normal, but for me and most aggro tournament players, they're definitely on the tight side, if not plain bad folds in theory.

The details aren’t important, (it was folding 33 and A7ss in semi-standard 3bet shove spots), they were both probably marginally +EV shoves but I did get to thinking about quantifying some of the reasons behind turning down these +EV spots.

1) FLAG Equity. A colombian flag is seriously niche. Does anyone reading have a colombian flag? Didn't think so. It's really cool - yellow, red and blue (but more yellow than red and blue - even cooler). This is my last chance (possibly ever!) to get one. Bragging rights, and it really adds something to the HM page which is, I won't say cluttered (it's not) with GB flags. Wow really saying GB not UK anymore?

Click to see full-size image.

2) Local currency liquidity. Punting in some big donkaments basically put me through all my Colombian Pesos and not cashing would mean I'd have to either lose a small chunk converting $ cash or use my credit card, which I never like doing in foreign countries and may lose out on the exchange rate anyway. Mincash was 3million pesos (About £1.2k) which would've got me through the next couple of weeks travelling.

3) ICM. I'm sceptical about writing too much about this, for fear of highlighting my weak grasp of the technicalities of the concept, but basically bubbling is bad for our $ equity (it's 0 duh) and not bubbling is good so we can sacrifice a small cEV edge right now because it's actually the right thing to do.

4) hEV. (Hee-Vee)

noun
Happiness expected value. Quantifying or justifying non $EV factors that come into play when making decisions in life.

Finally to the point of the blog. I would've been really gutted to bubble. Morale would have taken a serious hit. It was the last chance for a cash like I said, so if I didn't then the trip is a financial failure. That makes me feel bad when planning future trips as most of the trips I've been on have been losing ones (Vegas, San Remo, Campione, Austria to name just the ones this year!) even though my Marbella score means I'm well up on trips overall. It also makes me feel bad for the rest of the night, tomorrow when I'm grinding the sundays alone in my hotel room and would probably loom over the rest of my travels, rather than even just a mincash which would make me feel like it was all worth it - we've got a flag, we've made a bit of $ and we've had a good time.

***

Soon after the bubble burst and I shoved A6hh in a marginal spot (got there vs AK obv) and 3bet shoved 22 in another close spot and got it through. Both were fine shoves, but I would've folded both had we still been on the bubble.

These feelings of being a "pussay" crop up quite regularly in my day to day poker life too. This brings me onto the concept of "booking wins".

I'm definitely more emotional than most about winning or losing. Probably more so than all my fellow professionals that I know well (except for Belton ldo). So I place high importance on going home happy - I like being happy. I like going to sleep happy. And I like waking up the next day happy. All of these things happen when I win nicely, and don't generally happen if I lose big. That's just me, I'm weird, sorry.

So when I'm up £1k in a 1/2 game and there's half an hour to go, I'm happy with that. That's a really good win for £1/2 right? And generally, for a person to win A THOUSAND POUNDS in a day, that's pretty great actually right? I mean muggles say earn on average £10 an hour, that's £80 in a day. My hourly equates to earning quite a bit more than that, but still, my EV for a session is nowhere near £1000. So when presented with an alright spot to fire a £800 river bluff last hand of the night, am I going to take it? Probably not! Don't get me wrong, if it's not close, I'll do it (nah I'm kidding, £800 with nothing, are you mental?!), but if there's a decision that's close, I'm definitely going for the cautious route to preserve the win, and preserve morale for another day. Playing poker professionally is tough on the emotions, for me it is anyway, so keeping morale high for another day is not something to be sniffed at. For those that play in the same cash games as me: This is all a giant level.

The same logic applies to when I'm having a big losing day. My hEV won't change much if I lose a few hundred quid more, but it'll be greatly restored and it'll feel like a win if I get out of it. Hence the odd £200 roulette spin, blackjack hand, or "let's 5b allin with K5suited and if it goes tits up try and make a flush" sort of play. Galfond touches on this idea when he talks about taking breaks when he feels he's not playing his best. He carries on because even his B or C game is still +EV in soft games and his hEV won't go down that much if he loses a further $x whereas it'll go up a lot if he wins $x.

So it works both ways, when we (me and Phil that is, not the royal we (yes we’re chums now by the way)) are losing big, we don't mind losing a bit more for the chance to get out of it, and when we (royal we, Galfond doesn't talk about this) are winning big, we don't risk all our profits on a marginal decision to win a bit more.

It's something that comes with age and experience and even though I'm a pretty huge sucker for it now, I'm a lot better than I used to be. There's some people that you never see flustered about winning or losing. These people have small hEV coefficients. I envy those people in a way because they can handle the emotional swings of the game much better than me. But I'm not built like that (large hEV coefficient) and I'm fine with that.

Don't get me wrong, if I was a robot, I'd make a lot more money. All these decisions are to do with emotions and are basically turning down $ev (quitting games early, wimping out of profitable bluffs/shoves etc) and the more you can control your emotions and forget these things, the better. That is not to say I think they're bad things at all. They're all human nature, and totally normal and healthy emotions to have. Who wants to be a robot anyway? (Actually my Maths teacher from school said that it was his lifetime ambition to become as much like a computer as he could!). There's so much more to life than $EV - I'm lucky to be able to say that a huge proportion of my life I can say that I'm happy, and I'm 100% fine with not being those few bucks richer for that.

Click to see full-size image.

I clicked quote just to be annoying.

I agree. If you are realistic about your self-control and know you are unable to prevent spewing after big losses, it is better to avoid what is a long term +ev play now so that you avoid what you know will be a much larger -ev spewing later if the play doesn't work out. But regardless of happiness if you are making decisions based on quantity of money and its real world value rather than quantity of betting units then you are not properly rolled for the game and your decisions every hand will be adversely affected.

reposting Jelavic goal

From what I can gather, the Irish defender strikes the ball to clear it from his 18 yard box towards the ether, but it ricochets and strikes the adjacent Croatian player, thus being played onto Jelavic who was, as the Irish team manager said, "two metres offside"

Is there a rule which says if the ball is played unintentionally to a player in an offside position, it is not offside?

Also, in the event of such a rule not existing, what of "a player must be deemed not to be interfering with the play in order to not be in an offside position". Jelavic was clearly interfering with the play.

Take a look for yourself.

Discuss.

So you're playing in a £1/£2 cash game at DTD and there's a raise to £6.

A guy flicks in two red £5 chips and says nothing.

Tell me, learned friends, how often have you seen this being done with the intention to raise (without any verbal statement of intention)? Why should there be any difference between that and this tournament?

Maybe this will settle it?



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-18298753

Jakken Ha'gaar is becoming a very interesting character and I'm gasping for Arya to go to Bravos!

Easily the best thing that's been on TV ever.

Being a Kent man these phrases boggle my mind. Where I'm from, we say things such as "har har, that was witty of you, Percival" and "One is amused". OK not really. But we do say "that was hilarious" or "oh my god that was sooooooo funny" and the like. You know. Things that actually make sense.

Nottingham is weird.

Tampon adverts

Vagisil

I understand I may be about to cause a sh*tstorm but I beg,

What about dibs?