Tommy Angelo

“Medding” is a word I made up while working on my new book. I needed it to fill a vacancy in my vocabulary. I was missing a catch-all term that included every imaginable awareness-type activity. I’ve been using the term medding for a while now, and test-driving it on other medders, who then start using it right away as if they’d been using it all along. That tells me that this really is a useful word.

MEDDING the noun: Many things are medding. Meditation is medding. Yoga is medding. Medding includes every act of mindfulness, such as mindful standing, sitting, walking, and lying down. And mindful eating and drinking. And mindful hearing and listening. And mindful stopping. And of course it includes any attention you put on your breathing, such as following the ins and outs, or counting, or altering, or belly breathing, or just noticing. Watching your own thoughts and feelings come and go is medding. Basically, any type of intentional coming back to or remaining in the present by way of paying attention to what is observable in the herenow is medding.

MEDDING the verb: It means to do any of that stuff in the previous paragraph.

And now, in keeping with one of the great traditions of wordsmithing, I shall use the word medding in a sentence:

“I was doing some medding the other day, at the grocery store, in the cereal aisle, and I noticed that there were many brightly colored boxes.”

That was fun. How about some more…

“It’s good to start with medding in the morning.”

“Poker and medding do mix.”

Which will be in my book, now that I have a word for it.

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This is a photograph of the biggest room at the 2010 World Series of Poker, minus the people. You know how we’ve been trained to think of a “football field” as a standard unit of area? Like a hectare or acre, except that we actually know how big it is? I paced off this room. It’s 120 yards long and 50 yards wide. Now that’s an area I can conceive! Until you fill it full of chairs with people on them, all playing poker. Then it becomes infinite and hivelike. And where I want to be.

So I’m sitting in this humongous room, about ten hours after this picture was taken, when the hive was buzzing, and I’m playing poker, and I’m looking around at all these poker dealers. Where the hell did they come from? There was like, billions of them. Where are they housed during the 10.5 months per year that the WSOP is not going on?

The next morning, on my walk, I ventured to the backside of the Rio complex and beyond, deep into the seamy underbelly of Las Vegas, where the delivery trucks roam. I came upon a large lot with a warehouse-type building on it. Barbed wire topped the chain link fence that surrounded the lot. Who are they keeping out? I wondered. Who are they keeping in?

The building had big letters on it. Las Vegas something or other.

As I moved closer, all was revealed, and the mystery was solved. Conveniently located right next to the biggest demand for dealers the world has ever seen, they have a dealer manufacturing and storage facility.

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I was listening to a client talk and here’s what he said…

“I’ve been running great lately. My bankroll is at an all-time high. It’s nice to have a little breathing room.”

And I thought to myself…

Yes it’s nice to have a little breathing room. Everybody should have one.

A few months ago I wrote about how destroying computer equipment could be the correct play for some poker players at certain times. That post is here.

That post inspired some guy named Greg to write the article below that Greg calls, “My mathematically driven project to find out the real EV behind tilt-induced mouse annihilation (or ‘TIMA’ as it’s never referred to).”

I saw Greg’s article at meltedfelt.com.

Greg’s own poker resource site is: http://www.thepokerbank.com

Enjoy! I sure did!

The EV of Smashing Your Mouse (mathsy version) – by Greg

So there I was reading this article by Tommy Angelo on the EV of mouse smashing. It’s really interesting and sheds a whole new light on one of my favourite pastimes.

The idea is that rendering your mouse inoperable prevents you from being able to continue playing poker whilst on tilt. Therefore, because the cost of your mouse is less than you would have lost had you continued to play, you actually save money.

However, like all sports fans my age I was left feeling a little empty due to the lack of mathematics. Just how +EV or -EV is it to smash your mouse? We need numbers. I needed to act quickly.

So I called up the Olsen twins, cancelled our threesome and started work on my mathematically driven project to find out the real EV behind tilt-induced mouse annihilation (or ‘TIMA’ as it’s never referred to).

The variables.

To come up with our equation for the EV of pitching your mouse to the nearest and firmest wall, we need to identify the variables that will effect how much money the act can save/lose us.

1) The cost of the mouse. Needs no explanation.

2) Collateral. Unless you’re playing outdoors, there’s a fair chance that the mouse isn’t going to be the only expense you have to deal with.

3) Your winrate whilst on tilt. This should in theory be very much negative thanks to your raging stupor, courtesy of a horrific bad beat.

4) The time in hours you would normally spend playing on tilt. The more blindly vengeful you are, the longer this glorious time period will be. This may be hard to judge however as severe bad beats tend to send us in to a tilt-coma that melts our own perception of space and time.

5) The time in hour you miss out on playing due to the lack of a pointing device for your computer. Can be referred to as “the downtime”. Assuming you manage to cool down before purchasing your next mouse, there will be a period where you’re actually missing out on playing poker and winning money.

6) Your standard winrate. We’ll need to combine this with our downtime to figure out how much cash monies we’re missing out on.

Now let’s force these all together to form an equation.

The equation.

• EVms = EV of smashing your mouse due to tilt.
• Play time is measure in hours.
• Winrates are measure in $/hour.

If you’re not good with maths don’t worry, just take it as it is and calm yourself down. It does make sense. If you are good at maths, I apologise for my god-awful notation (or lack of it).

This equation is all well and awesome, but it’s not really interesting unless we can plug in some numbers for different player types and work out the actual EV of mouse rape-age.

The EV of mouse smashing for different player types.

Let’s assume that each player experiences a 2 outer on the river and loses 200bbs. They then launch their mouse in an outward direction toward any hard surface or spouse. We’ll assume that if they didn’t break their mouse they would continue to play as they would under the influence of however much tilt they would experience thanks to the bad beat in question.

To make my life easier, let’s also assume that each player type plays $1/$2 NL Texas Hold’em cash and has the following:

• A mouse that costs $50.
• Collateral damage worth $25 on average per throw.
• A standard winrate of 6bb (big blinds) per hour when playing well. That’s $12/hour.
• Misses out on 4 hours worth of good playing time on average because they have no mouse after cooling down. That’s $48 in total.

The totally balanced player – The “Tommy Angelo”.

Tilt winrate = 6bb. Tommy Angelo doesn’t get tilted, tilt gets Tommy Angelo’d.
Tilt time = 0 hours. See above.

EV of mouse smashing for Tommy Angelo = -$123

If you never tilt, mouse smashing is never a +EV move.

The average player that gets a little pissed – The “Me or You”.

Tilt winrate = -25bb. Not great at all, but could be worse. We have a tendency to make more speculative shoves than normal. “Speculative” as in “bad”.
Tilt time = 1 hour. Sounds about right.

EV of mouse smashing for someone like yourself = -$73

Not really what I was expecting to be honest; I thought it would be a little closer to being +EV. Saying that, the “average” player type can vary by quite some margin, so you’re better off filling in the blanks for yourself.

The irate gambler – The “Phil Hellmuth playing a cash game”.

Tilt winrate = -200bb. Absolutely f*cking livid, one could say. Any skill you once had at the table is replaced by a new high-aggression frustration-driven strategy.
Tilt time = 3 hours. The vengeance factor is high here. The reason for stopping is due to lack of funds as opposed to actually coming to one’s senses.

EV of mouse smashing for Phil Hellmuth playing a cash game = +$277

It’s also worth noting that we have to keep an open mind whilst assuming that Phil Hellmuth would be able to achieve a winrate of 6bb at an NL cash table in the first place. Nonetheless, it’s very clear that irate gamblers benefit from a self-imposed suspension from play.

Conclusions.

Mouse smashing can pay off under the right conditions. Not for most level headed players though.

Don’t throw your mouse if you’re playing at micro or small stakes games. It’s unlikely to ever pay off.

Buy a cheaper mouse if you’re easily annoyed. The cost of the mouse should be inversely proportional to your susceptibility to uncontrollable rage.

A weighty mouse should create a much more satisfying smash, but increases the cost of collateral damage.

Phil Hellmuth shouldn’t play cash games.

It’s probably more +EV to just control your tilt rather than throw your mouse. Maybe.

Funny post went up today at DeucesCracked.com about The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment. This is in the thread for episode 4 (out of 8).

Post at DeucesCracked.com by RakeFactoryIMO on 3.25.10:

Hmm. I’ve been enjoying the series up until now. I started to watch this video, trying to relax and forget about my sinus infection making me feel miserable by focusing on something else for a while. What does it tell me to do? Focus on my breathing. Grr. I am mindful that I am angry about that. No, it is not helping. Life tilt ensues. I better watch something else for now or I might become the first person to smash my computer because I life tilted while watching a Tommy Angelo video.

Is this right quitting? LOL, haven’t gotten that far. <= somehow that helped

Dear congested,

I think you should try lying on one side until you get one nostril unplugged and then use that one to breathe through. And buy some computer calamity insurance.

Tommy

From an old folder, here’s a poker hand from 2002:

I was playing $20-40 limit hold’em at Lucky Chances during the thinning hours. The game had gone from too-loose when it was full, to just-right when it was seven-handed, to not-nearly-as-good-as-it-just-was when the last white guy busted out, and now we were down to six players. The next dealer was standing behind the current dealer, which meant that on the next hand it would be time for the half-hour time collection of $5 per player. It also meant that the game might break, since time-collection time is when people tended to quit, and this game was at that tender stage where one falling domino could wreck it all.

It was my small blind and I posted it. The big blind quit. The next player, who would now be the big blind, quit. The next player posted the big blind. We were now down to four players. I called time out and asked the floorman to come over.

This was tricky, a double cusp. I was on the small blind cusp which meant I didn’t want to post my small blind unless I knew I was going to get full value for it by then getting to play my button and cutoff. And I was on a quitting cusp because the game was looking like it might not be worth playing in. But I didn’t want to pay the $5 house collection for just three hands. Plus, for all I knew, the game would break right after I played the small blind. Cusps.

The floorman knew there would be a rush for the cage if he charged us anything at all this time around, so he made the standard and proper ruling, and he said we could play the next half hour for free. We the people said okay, thank you, deal us in.

I posted the small blind. The next guy posted the big blind, and we were in action. The first player folded, the button folded, I now it was just me and the big blind, an opponent who I normally chop with. I gave him a question-mark look, asking with my eyes, “Do you want to chop?” He said “Okay, we chop this time, but after that, we play, we shorthand, we gamble.”

“Gamble, we gamble,” the other three of us sung somewhat in chorus. “No more chop chop. Now we play. We gamble.” There was that happy little moment when a shorthanded game settles into phase.

Next hand, I had the button. The under-the-gun player limped. Yamaha Tony we called him, because he wore the same jacket everyday for like three years that had the word Yamaha on it. I raised. One of the blinds called and the other blind folded. Tony called my raise (recall that call later!) and there were three of us heading to the flop.

The flop came. The blind checked, Tony checked, and I checked.

The turn came. The blind checked, Tony checked, and I checked.

The river came. The blind checked, Tony bet, I folded, and the blind folded. That was it. Tony won the most least contested pot of the night.

Tony, in an animated Chinese accent several pitches higher than usual, said, “You guys say you gamble you no gamble none of you gamble we going to gamble or go home?”

Then he turned over pocket aces.

And laughed. As did we all.

And went home. As did we all.

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

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.

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

Snake Eyes video

Small Soldiers video

download The Ewok Adventure dvd

Tyrannosaurus Azteca movie download

See ya there!