Archive for the 'poker' Category
Posted by: Tommy Angelo on January 31st, 2010
Below is a post I just posted at DeucesCracked.com, where my video series The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment recently won three awards.
* * * * *
One of my favorite academy award acceptance speeches was from last year, when the Coen brothers won best picture for No Country for Old Men. One of them said something like, “Thank you, academy, for letting us play in our own little corner of your sandbox.”
That’s how I feel right now.
Another thing that was great about their speech is that it was very short. They are probably good at that from having won lots of awards. Well, this is my first time at this. So I’m going to take my time. :-)
Around 2003, in the middle of the poker explosion, when poker websites were sprouting up all over the place, and players and writers who had a name were aligning themselves with websites, I had a conversation with my wife during which I made two predictions:
1) I said that a few years from now, there would be lots of players who had become good at betting since the explosion, and some of them would realize that in order to continue to significantly increase their earn, they would need to move some of their improvement energy away from betting strategy, and divert it to discipline problems they have in areas like tilt, quitting, bankroll, and health, both mental and physical. I decided to become a poker coach, and I based my coaching program in part on that prediction.
2) I said that someday I would probably align myself with a website. I told her I had no idea what type of site it would be, or why it would happen. The main prediction I made to her was that I would only do it once.
A few years later, my good friend Joe Tall called me up to tell me about DeucesCracked. I already knew Chris and Rob from the 2+2 forums and I was a big fan of their writing and thinking and attitude. From my happy little home I watched with great enthusiasm as their company and union grew. And then a while later Joe called me up to tell me about the plans to merge with Jay and Chuck of 3bet.net. I was in on a couple group phone calls where the topic was me. Some brainstorming happened about how I might be involved in some way. Nothing came of it, in terms of action. All I remember was feeling very, very excited about the whole thing. Their vision and maturity and business savvy blew me away. I knew that DC was going to be something very special.
In January of 2008 I met Jay and Chuck in San Francisco and we tooled around for a couple days. Right after that, I talked it over with my wife, and we made one of the easiest big decisions I’ve ever made. There’s only one website for me from here on out. We had no idea in what professional capacity I might be involved with DC, or if I would do anything other than read and write posts. What I knew was that I had a home.
And then along came Wayne, and the idea of the Eightfold Path series, and the many conversations Wayne and I had laying out the outline, and then we did the first recordings, and then I started recording piano bits and inserted them in between our conversations, and then I went to Seattle a couple times to work with Rob and we built the first few episodes, and then more recording with Wayne, and more piano playing, and more audio engineering by me, and Rob and I designed a way to build episodes remotely, and by the summer of 2009, when the last few episodes were coming together, I was in the same kind of groove I was in during the late stages of working on Elements of Poker, which is basically as happy as it is possible for me to be, consumed with and by a project in which I had the support and wisdom of excellent persons to draw on, while I enjoyed the freedom and thrill of making thousands of final decisions.
So that’s one part of the joy of EPTPE and me. The other thing, the bigger thing, is about the message of the series, which is, in my opinion, in a word: peace. Somehow by being battered about by poker, I found myself on a path toward peace. And I wanted to share that journey for the benefit of others. It is a great honor for me, and Wayne, and Rob, to have EPTPE receive three awards. Winning the “Away from the Table” award is awesome. Winning “Best Overall Video” is very awesome. But the one that I’m really excited about is the “Best Episode in a Series” award, for episode 8. There was a couple months between when Wayne and I finished recording the conversations in episode 7, and started recording episode 8. Much extra planning and effort went into E8. My vision was to have it be a stand alone work. Kind of like, “If you are only going to watch one episode of this series, watch this one.” And my primary hope, really my only hope, was that E8 would land on the viewer like a sledgehammer, and like a feather, at the same time, and say hey, wake up, and soften up. I am going to allow myself to believe that because E8 was recognized by this award, my hope came true.
With heaps of gratitude,
Tommy
Posted by: Tommy Angelo on January 19th, 2010
In 2003, I intentionally folded pocket aces before the flop in a live, $20/40 limit hold’em game. It was, according to my meticulous calculations, the worst play ever. But that wasn’t the only reason I did it. I wrote an article at the time in which all is revealed:
http://tommyangelo.com/articles/the_worst_play_ever.htm
Today I am here to claim credit for also having made the second worst play ever. But this time, I had help – or more accurately, I helped. Most of the credit must go to my partner in perversion, Eric.
THE DATE: August 20, 2009
THE PLACE: The Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, room 22017
THE PLAYERS: Me, Eric, and an unwitting cohort who shall remain forever oblivious of the gift bestowed upon him by our lunacy.
Eric is a young professional poker player who hired me as his coach. During the first day of a three-day coaching program, Eric told me that my article “The Worst Play Ever” had inspired him to fold pocket aces before the flop too. We briefly discussed the long-range effects that making this outrageous play had on us. Turns out, there aren’t any. But we did note that it gave us a quirky little bond, like two people who bump into each other and spill each other’s coffee.
At the end of the third day, after the official coaching was officially over, we decided to play some low stakes online poker and split our action, just for fun. Minutes later we were playing two tables of 6-max $1/2 no-limit hold’em, with Eric driving. Because my iPhone was still recording the coaching session, these events were etched in silicon.
Eric and I were having a grand time, casting aspersions and making proclamations exactly as I had coached him not to. I did some bold mock-yelling at my faceless opponents after I convinced Eric to call a river bet with ace-high. “You’re all a bunch of ding donks and I hate you all!” Eric did some mock-mocking of me after I talked him into bluff-check-raising the river against a player who happened to have the nuts. “It’s a good thing you charge a lot for your coaching,” he said, “because you suck at playing.”
A couple minutes went by with no interesting betting decisions. Eric was playing on autopilot as we discussed his method for quickly sizing up the skill level of an opponent, when suddenly, the talking stopped, and we both gazed lustfully at our latest hole cards: pocket aces, on the button.
“Now there’s a hand with some creative potential,” I said.
The first two players folded and the cutoff opened for $6. He had $200, as did we.
Eric said, “What are we doing?”
I said, “We’re … calling!”
Eric said, “Okay,” and he called.
Both blinds folded. The pot was now headsup.
Eric said, “Hey, we’re up against the bozo player.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I distinctly remember what I was thinking at the time. I was thinking about the financial and emotional damage we were about to inflict on this poor unsuspecting sap who had chosen to visually represent his being with the image of a mostly squashed cockroach.
Eric, anticipating a continuation bet by the cutoff, asked, “Are we instant calling? Instant raising?” Then he paused, and added, “Or folding?”
I erupted with a big loud laughing AHHHHHH-ha-ha-ha-ha and Eric joined in just as loud, right away. I said, “I like your thinking!”
The flop came out 10-6-2 rainbow. The cutoff bet $12 into the $15 pot.
Eric said, “This’ll be the first time anyone made a play like this, on purpose anyway.”
I said, “Wow, you’re really serious about this? That would be wild.” The tempo and pitch of my voice started going up as I processed what was really going on here: “Go ahead! Do it! Fold it!”
Eric giggled, and…
Click. Aces gone.
SMACK! A stinging high five.
We relished the monumentalness of the moment. This went way beyond coffee spilling. This was more like walking on the moon together and puking up our Tang. I rambled on about the incredible improbability of this event. First, I had to be wacko enough to fold those aces six years ago, and then write about it, and Eric had to read about it, and hire me to coach him, and then we had to share our action, and get pocket aces, and then, Eric had to somehow summon enough awareness to think of folding the aces at that perfectly absurd postflop moment.
That I would enthusiastically say yes to Eric’s suggestion was a given. This is the kind of thing that if you pass it up, you regret it forever. Even if you forget it ever happened, the regret lives on inside you, chewing away at your mind’s lining, dampening your dynamics in that way that makes people who haven’t seen you in a while say things like, “You’ve changed.” But they aren’t smiling. Okay, maybe it’s not like that. But it’s something.
Eric and I have talked and emailed plenty since that day, and the pocket aces hand has never come up. It’s like it never happened. Except it did. It’s like we are no different than before. Except we are. It’s like nothing ever matters, except everything always does.
Posted by: Tommy Angelo on November 9th, 2009
The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment (EPTPE) is a poker video series I made with Wayne Lively and Rob Cole. It’s about making your A-game better and playing your A-game more often. Today I launched a web page that contains many words by me about the series, plus all sorts of goodies:
• The music from the eptpe series (80 mp3s of piano music played by me)
• Three songs from my 2001 CD, “I’m Running Bad.”
• All of the songs from my 1980 album, “A Work of Aardvark.”
• Original drawings from the EPTPE video series
• Photographs
• Some favorable posts from the DeucesCracked forums
• Links to each of the 8 EPTPE episodes at DeucesCracked, where you can see the first two minutes of each episode for free. After that, it’ll cost ya!
Here’s the webpage:
http://tommyangelo.com/the-eightfold-path-to-poker-enlightenment.html
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on November 5th, 2009
You’re playing live poker and you just folded before the flop. You’ve got a minute or two, maybe longer, before you get more cards. What to do? What to do? You could watch TV. You could turn the volume up on your headphones. You might order a beverage, or converse with a player. Maybe you’ve got some urgent tweeting to do. Heck you might even just sit there and watch the players play the hand. Whatever you do, it’s okay. You can still recover from it. Just as long as you do this one last thing:
Assume the position.
Imagine you’re in the middle of a big and dramatic headsup pot. On the turn, your opponent bets out. You have him covered. You say, “I’m all in.” And you freeze.
Your opponent pauses. His pause stretches into a delay. The delay elongates into a stall. After a while, the stall extends itself fully and becomes overtly annoying, to everyone, but especially to you, and he keeps poking his eyes at you, then looking at the wall or something, and then he stares at you again, and you look away when he does, and you’re trying to keep still and not give up anything, but you feel yourself squirming around because your body is not in a stable position. It’s weak. It’s out of control.
Have you ever found yourself semi-frozen in a slouchy, undignified posture and been stuck there during the all-in freeze frame? I sure have. Lots of times. And I’ve seen it too. It reminds me of that original Star Trek episode where people are frozen in time in whatever posture they happened to be in. It’s as if saying the words “all in” commits the speaker to a ritualistic stillness ceremony.
So, what to do? How do you insure that you will look strong when you’re being looked over?
Assume the position.
download film No matter what you are doing or thinking between hands, when the dealer starts dealing, stop. Stop, and pretend. Pretend you’re playing that big pot. You make your big all-in raise, and you freeze. Your opponent looks like he is going to take a while. Stop and imagine that moment. Imagine the posture you would want to be in. The one that makes you look good and feel good. The one that says I got no worries or hurries. And then assume that position. If you do this before every hand, you will know you have done your best.Inhabited move buy The Sword in the Stone
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on October 25th, 2009
Whose fault was it? According to Bob, it was Mary’s fault. But if you ask Mary, she’ll tell you it was Bob’s fault. Joe – (Joe is a big picture kind of guy) – Joe saw the whole thing, and he doesn’t think it was Bob’s fault, or Mary’s fault, because really, the problem started with something nasty that Susie said last week, which was probably the result of the way her mom raised her, so really it was all Susie’s mom’s fault.
But why stop there? Shouldn’t a logical examination of “first blame” always bring us to the same conclusion?
“It’s the universe’s fault!!”
Yes it should, except I’ve got an even better idea.
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When I was growing up, two of the first things they taught me about God was that He is everywhere and you can’t see him. When I was learning physics, two of the first things they taught me about atoms was that they are everywhere and you can’t see them. Atoms are therefore God.
Like God and atoms, the universe is also everywhere. The difference is that the universe is not invisible. For me, this makes it much harder to blame things on the universe, since I have to look at it while I do so. I like the idea of shouting “It’s your fault” at something I can’t see. It appeals to my cowardice. So the universe is out of the running. The choice is God or atoms.
That’s an easy choice for me. Lots of people blame God for things. I’ve never heard of anyone blaming atoms. So I’ll do that.
I’m now ready. Maybe later today something will happen that makes me want to shake my fist in rage, and there won’t be anyone or anything I can blame for whatever happened, but that won’t stop me…
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on October 19th, 2009
In March 2009, I got a letter from Guillermo Gonzales, editor in chief of Sportivo Magazine, the top hard-copy poker magazine in Italy. Guillermo asked if it would be okay if he translated some of my poker articles to Italian and published them in his magazine. I immediately sent a copy of Guillermo’s email to my huge Italian family and asked, “How do you say ‘HELL YES!’ in Italian?”
Guillermo and I talked.
“How many of my articles do you want to use?”
“Eight,” he said.
“Do you know which ones?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to choose them for you?”
“Hell Yes!!”
So I went through my articles and picked out the ones that have been linked to or referenced the most, and I sent them in.
A few months later, my first issue of Sportivo arrived. I went to the Table of Contents. It was very exciting to see my name there, in the middle of what looked to me like an Italian restaurant menu. The name of my article was Reciprocita: la ragione del profitto nel poker The Lion King ipod , which I knew translated to Reciprocality: The Cause of Profit at Poker
So, ragione must mean cause. This was going to be really fun.
I opened the magazine to my article. The layout was superb. I started reading. I’ve heard a lot of Italian, but I barely speak a word, unless you count things like “pasta” and “That’s amore.” But because I was extremely familiar with the English version of what I was reading, the language center of my brain starting pulling lots of extra blood, with patterns and puzzles coming and going like crazy.
My article in the latest issue of Sportiva was particularly fun to read. It’s like, everything sings in Italian. The name of the article is Folding. The very end goes like this:
And all of a sudden, I can’t lose. I love folding. download Good Dick
Which in Italian, sounds like this:
E d’improvviso, non posso perdere. Amo foldare.
I love Amo foldare.
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on October 5th, 2009
.!.
I just got off the phone with a mouse smasher. Or you could call him a mouse masher. (It sounds the same either way, whether you are saying it, or doing it.) I’m going to call him Humphrey. The topic was poker coaching. During the conversation, Humphrey asked some questions I had heard before:
Q: Did you really fold pocket aces before the flop just for the hell of it?
A: Yes. Can you think of a better reason?
Q: I tilt. Can you straighten me out?
A: No. But you can.
Q: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?
A: I don’t know. And I don’t care.
Okay, I admit. Nobody has asked me that last question. But I’m ready if they do!
I asked Humphrey to elaborate on his tilting. Here’s what he told me…
“Usually my tilt is merely a percolating, churning, grinding, retching, undercurrent of suckiness and ill-being.”
“You don’t say.”
“But sometimes,” said Humphrey, “it gets really bad. It’s as if a tightly coiled spring of Reardon metal suddenly unwinds at the speed of insanity. The metal impales my arm and seizes control. My hand grabs my mouse, and then, with the zip and accuracy of a third baseman throwing to first, I fling the mouse at the wall and – kaBLAM, chinkle tink thunk – the mouse comes to rest, in pieces, on the floor, as do I.”
“And you call that tilt?”
“Of course it’s tilt! What the hell would you call it?”
“I’d call it a religious experience.”
“A what?”
“Think about it. You were redeemed. You were liberated. You were saved. Sounds like religious talk to me.”
“I wasn’t saved! I was violently enraged!”
::: insert soothing exhale here :::
“Let me ask you something.”
“Okay,” said Humphrey.
“How much is your typical win or loss per session?”
“I’d say it’s in the $200-$400 range.”
“Let’s say that instead of smashing your mouse, you had sat there and kept playing, swimming against your undercurrent of suckiness. What do you think your EV would have been for the rest of that session?”
“Not good. At all.”
“Okay. One more question. How much does a mouse cost?”
::: pause :::
“You’re right, I was saved,” said Humphrey.
“Yes you were. This time. But from here on in, it won’t be so easy. Now that you have seen The Way, you will need to develop an entirely new disciplinary practice, one that has never before existed on this earth. Are you ready for a challenge?”
“Possibly. What is it?”
“When you venture forth to acquire your replacement mouse, you will be tempted by the tilt demon. You must be prepared to defend, like a warrior, or else you will surely be slain.”
“Go on.”
“Hanging in the aisles of merchandise, or browsing through an online store, you will see many mice before you. But you must purchase only one. For if you were to…”
“Okay, okay, I get it. You’re saying that if I’m such a tilt monkey that it’s sometimes hugely plus EV for me to smash my mouse, that I should embrace my rodent-killing ways. And to ensure I make money from mouse smashing, I must never buy more than one at a time. This isn’t the world’s most complicated idea.”
“True. Yet there are few master mouse smashers.”
“So is that it? Aren’t you going to break into some speech about how I shouldn’t let myself get that tilted in the first place?”
“Sounds like you already know that to me.”
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on September 27th, 2009
Lee Jones sent me this screenshot. He added the comment in red and the two red boxes. You can click on the image to see a larger version.
That’s my book, right between the laser mouse and the lens cleaner. At the top is the item Lee was shopping for, a 30-inch monitor. That’s the item for which it is true that: Customers who bought this item also bought Elements of Poker.
Why would people who buy big monitors buy poker books? It’s because when you play poker on the internet, you can do what’s called “multi-tabling.” That means playing in more than one poker game at the same time. It’s like what Bobby Fisher used to do at chess, except multi-tabling is spectacularly faster, and it’s for money, and you can bluff, and everybody can play as many games as they want. Okay, so it’s barely like what chess masters do. It’s more like what video gamers do, which is: AS MUCH AND AS FAST AS POSSIBLE OF COURSE!!!
How many games do people play? The most I’ve ever heard of is 16. Lots of online poker players play 10 tables or more. To those people, square inchage is vital. Imagine if you had a dozen programs open and you needed to see them all at the same time. That’s how it is when you multi-table. What would you do if increasing your visual real estate would increase your income? You’d buy a bigger monitor, or two. Which is exactly what many poker players have done, and do.
So it’s not all that surprising that a poker book would show up in a “Customers who bought this item also bought” section at Amazon when “this item” is a 30-inch monitor. But why my book? Yes, it’s well regarded and selling well, but that’s true of dozens of other poker books. Why would poker players who are expanding their playing capacity buy my голова болит секс Gummo psp
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Lee’s email to me contained the only plausible answer to the question. Lee imagined being inside the mind of the professional poker player who just added more monitor space to his poker command center:
“Hmmm. I’m going to be playing a lot of tables at once. Now more than ever, I need to tilt less…” голова болит секс
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on September 18th, 2009
The meaning of “reconcile” in play here is “to make consistent or congruous.” In other words… How can someone walk the path of harmlessness if it has poker tables on it?
I anticipated that I would be asked this question after The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment Restless Natives rip came out. The title alone begs the question. Yesterday I was asked the question twice. In the previous weeks, about five other times. During the previous 6 years or so, I have asked myself the same question a few times.
Let’s say there’s a guy who plays poker, and he starts meditating every morning and doing mindfulness stuff all day long and reading about it and talking to knowledgeable people about it. He goes all-in with the practice and the teachings. He learns about harmlessness, intellectually, and it makes sense. He learns about harmlessness, experientially, and he watches himself and his world change. He likes where it’s leading. Eventually a day comes when there are no poker tables on his path. It might have happened suddenly, a quick turn: “Poker harms me and others! Therefore I shall no longer do it!” Or it might have happened gradually, with no forethought, just a naturally weaning. In either case, it was the move toward a life guided in part by an attitude of harmlessness that made him move away from poker, which, by his definition, causes harm.
Let’s look at another guy. He is a poker player, and last week he heard some things about meditation. He heard it would improve his concentration and make him less emotionally reactive. He thinks this would be great for his poker game. So he learns more, and he starts doing some of the practices, the ones that he thinks will help him focus better and therefore do better at poker. Over the next ten years, he builds his repertoire of mindful breathing and concentration exercises that he does while he plays poker, and he occasionally does them in regular life during high-stress situations. He and his life are made better (more tiltless) by the practices that he rightly thinks of as stemming from his poker life, in the same way that a businessman might think of poker as something that hones his people-reading skills. The concept of “harmlessness” is nowhere in the mix. Yet when he plays poker now, he harms himself much less than he used to. And when he plays poker, he harms his opponents less than he used to. The things he says. The things he does. The things he thinks. The vibe he sends out. The bitterness is gone. The meanness is gone. The need to make others small is gone.
The first guy quit poker. The second guy has no plans to quit poker. Both are walking the path of harmlessness.
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Posted by: Tommy Angelo on September 15th, 2009
Did a fun interview last night with Mike Johnson and Adam Schwartz at TwoPlusTwo.com Pokercast. My second time of probably many. As one of the original disciples of the Temple of 2+2, it is dreamlike to be a guest on that show. (Special thanks and howdy to Steven (*TT*), the maker of things that happen.)
Here’s a link to the interview:
http://pokercast.twoplustwo.com/pokercast.php?pokercast=88
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I am the second guest. My segment starts at 1:14:04 and ends at 2:03:30. We talk aboutThe Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment
and miscellaneous topics. I think my favorite line of the whole thing is just a few seconds before the end, when Mike plugs my book. He says:
“The book is “Elements of Poker” and if you haven’t read that, what have you been doing?”
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