Week in Review #32 October 27th - November 2nd
I write about Chauncey Billups and private games
When I first started this Substack, I asked POTD subscriber Nate Silver for advice, and he shared a newsletter he wrote, repurposing some advice from Glengarry Glen Ross: Always. Be. Blogging. Some of the advice he shared does not apply to a daily poker strategy newsletter, but one piece of advice I tried to follow was, when something topical that is in the wheelhouse of your Substack is in the news, write about it quickly. Topical blogs drive the most traffic and will generate subscriber growth, or as Nate put it:
3. Home runs come from timely, differentiated content
To extend the baseball metaphor, home runs are more predictable than any other type of hit. They come when a pitcher leaves a juicy pitch somewhere out over the middle of the plate. And the batter takes a big rip and connects.
The equivalent in the newsletter business is when there’s a topic that you have some unique expertise or insight on — and you’re at bat when the news comes in and prepared to take a big swing.
So when Chauncey Billups and many others got indicted for participating in and allegedly organizing crooked poker games that used all sorts of sophisticated cheating methods to swindle people out of millions, I got on my blogging gloves and started taking cuts in the on-deck circle. However, once I got to the plate, I realized I didn’t have that much to say. The advice I will share is not differentiated from others. If you are invited to a private game, or frankly offered any lucrative investment opportunity, and you fit the profile of a professional poker player, ask yourself: Why are they asking me? It’s rare for people to give away free EV to a stranger, and if they want nothing in return and you barely know them, I would be extremely cautious. POTD Subscriber Isaac Haxton has quoted Groucho Marx to me when describing being invited to poker games: “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.”
The other thing is, while this story is in my wheelhouse in that I know more about it than, say, your cousin who read about the indictment in the New York Post, my knowledge is entirely second-hand. I know how these games often work, and I know people who have played in, if not these specific games, games like these, but I have never played in them myself. So while I have some knowledge to impart on my readers, I cannot give you an exclusive insider look into this world. I have avoided playing in these games the way I have avoided playing in the NFL. It might be dangerous for me, but also, no one is asking me to play.
However, I have one corrective that I think is important to note about getting cheated or scammed in poker or any form of gambling. Whenever there is a story about a lucrative cheating scandal, there is an assumption it is sophisticated. Invisible ink is used in children’s arts and crafts projects; it can be purchased on Amazon or at Toys ‘R’ Us. You do not need to be a criminal mastermind to mark cards with it.
The easiest way to win money at poker is to play in a very soft game with a lot of spots. The easiest way to cheat at poker is to find spots who won’t notice unsophisticated cheating methods. All those spam phone calls and e-mails you get that are “so obvious”? That’s by design. The scammers are fishing for people who are not savvy enough to avoid a really obvious trap, because if they fall for the first e-mail, then they’re more likely to send you money by the time they reach the eighth step.
One of the most effective scams I’ve ever encountered in my life in gambling, one that is nearly undefeated and is not very sophisticated, is simply not paying. I owe you this money? Well, I am not paying; what are you going to do? Send your goons after me? You may not believe this, but I do not have goons to send after people. If I played in the Chauncey Billups games that were (allegedly) run by goons and they decided to stiff me, I would have zero recourse. If the mafia said “we are not paying you,” I am not filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau or arguing with them; I am taking my losses.
So I don’t play in private games, because I am not invited to them, they often have high rake, sometimes you get stiffed, and, as per the indictment, sometimes the games are crooked. Which brings me to my final point: if you are playing in a game and something unusual happens, be very wary. I remember someone discussing a private PLO game they played and they said “I set over settled someone twice and lost both times. What are the odds of losing both?” and I wanted to respond “umm, 100%.” If a game is “so soft” that you might be winning at 30bbs/100 before rake, but you might get stiffed or cheated and the rake is very high, is this actually a “very soft game,” or just a normal reasonably profitable game where the standard deviation of your win rate is enormous?
I don’t want to make it seem like every private game is fixed; many people have navigated the private game world successfully, and it is a skill that is mostly independent from being a great poker player. If you want to make money in that world, those are the skills you must hone. Of course, you can get cheated playing app games, online poker on regulated sites, and while cheating scandals in big live tournaments are rare, I am sure some shenanigans are afoot. When there is a lot of money at stake, there is some sort of risk of systematic cheating. I’ll close with a simple cliché that is good advice to anyone getting invited to a great game: “If something sounds good to be true, it probably is.”
If you’d like more writing like this from me, or just good old fashioned hand history analysis, please consider becoming a paid or unpaid subscriber. I know a guy playing $100,000 poker tournaments asking for $10/month might seem a little greedy, but I am writing around 10,000 words a week, which is almost twice as many words as the Eastern District of New York’s indictment of Chauncey Billups et al. All the subscription tiers are explained here, and you can subscribe or upgrade your subscription by clicking the button below.
Additional Sims For Premium Subscribers
Premium subscribers get the raw files of sims I used to write my POTDs, sims that are more accurate and appropriate than equivalent sims in the big public libraries, videos of me walking through the sims, and a text summary of how I ran the sims. This week I uploaded:
A 250bb 3BP sim using two different pairs of preflop ranges for POTD #156
Two multiway Rocket Solver sims for POTD #157
Two multiway Rocket Solver sims and a PIO river sim for POTD #158
A PIO sims looks at squeezed pots POTD #159
A Rocket Solver flop sim and PIO turn sim for POTD #160
Additional Analysis for Premium Subscribers
Everyday Premium Subscribers get an extra bit of analysis not included on Substack. Today I’ll share #onemorething from POTD #158 where I wrote about the reverse implied odds of drawing to some very strong hands in multiway pots
One thing that frequently happens in multiway pots, but especially four- or five-way pots, is the effects of card removal amplify. Let’s use today’s flop as an example. Say you have Tc9c, what are the odds someone has a bigger flush draw than you? Not that high, but once a lot of money goes into the pot on the flop, what are the odds someone has a bigger flush draw than you? Significantly higher. Once you turn or river your flush and a bunch of money goes into the pot, what are the odds someone has a bigger flush than you? Extremely high. In a four-way pot, you’re going to see a lot less bluffing by one player with AcTx or KcQx, and you are going to see that class of hand float vs. check-raises a lot less often as well. That means when a club hits, both players will have a flush a lot and not too many one-card flush blocker combos. So a medium flush will have less equity and you will have fewer hands to potentially bluff with. The solver recognizes this and solves this problem earlier in the hand by folding some pretty strong draws before the pot gets too big.
This also occurs with some straight draws. If you defend the BB in a three-way pot and the flop is Q95, a gutshot “to the nuts” is not a sneaky draw to players who recognize that on a 6 turn the bb will have 16 combos of 87. The solver sees that 76 is not that strong on an 8 turn because you actually run into JT a lot more often than you might like. If you’re playing games where people won’t fold top pair to a single bet even when a flush fills in a multi-way pot, you can get away with overplaying draws, but vs. strong players, you’ll run into higher draws too often and won’t get paid enough when you hit.
Housekeeping
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Media
I was on the GTO Lab podcast and after they edited it down, I did not break the record for the longest podcast episode they recorded. That record still belongs to Daniel Dvoress himself, the longest episode recorded by a non GTO Lab pro, belongs to Joao Viera. Maybe if they have me back for season 2, I can beat the record. This was recorded awhile ago, so I forget everything that I said, but I talk about the arc of the “Hot Hand Fallacy” and it will be something I’ll be writing about next week in this space.
The only media I consumed this week, that was not related to the Toronto Blue Jays or listening to the playlist I created for Kayhan Mokri that I posted in POTD #152, was watching Top Chef Canada. I have some gripes, but I think people will be less interested in those takes than my baseball takes, so instead I will share all the ways to reach me below.