The Poker Nerd

Anyone who qualified for the WSOP main event online this year knows by now that Harrahs, which owns and runs the event, elected not to take third-party payments for pre-registration this year. As a result, the sites have had to transfer US$10,000 in cash to each player and let us fend for ourselves in order to get registered. But, that’s just the tip of the clusterfuckberg.

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This weekend, I was kicking around a particularly large problem with HomeGame that I still don’t have an answer for. It’s the dilemma of self-dealing. Here’s the problem in a nutshell: In a self-dealt game, the dealer doesn’t know the cards he’s dealing out, but the person receiving them does. However, the dealer also has to be able to verify that the cards each player turns up are, in fact, the cards they were dealt.

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I realized a hole in my tournament game this weekend based on blind progression.

A rule of thumb with tournaments is that, the faster the blinds progress, the more aggressive you have to be to survive (all other things being equal.) My mistake was thinking of blind progression velocity as a function of time when, in fact, it’s a function of hand-count.

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Since HomeGame is the first major project I’ve undertaken at home in a few years (and a couple of computer upgrades,) I don’t really have what I would consider a “shop” at home. I have a compiler of course, but I’m talking about the tools and libraries that end up being needed in any project of this size.

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This week, Andy Bloch writes about continuation bets. I’ve been thinking about the subject a lot. Unfortunately, the article barely touches on the one aspect I’ve been thinking about most: position.

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According to this article, the Poker Dome will soon be no more.

While the Poker Dome Challenge was always more than a little bit cheesy, I always thought its novelty made it worth watching. Unfortunately, it never got any “name” players (probably due to the low payouts) and was always dependent on the relatively tiny Mansion Poker for its lifeblood.

One of the things that prompted me to start this blog was to write about the project I’m starting, It’s called HomeGame.

The basic premise is this: Nearly all Internet games are played client-server style. There’s one big server that’s responsible for keeping track of score, dealing cards, and basically being the house. But, that’s not the only way to play the game.

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I’ve got a Big Project I’ll be talking about shortly, but I wanted to kick out an interesting problem that’s going to be part of the bigger project. The question is: How do you numerically rank starting hands in Texas Hold ‘Em?

I’ve seen plenty of systems which categorize starting hands into groups. But, what I need is a programmatic way to give an absolute numeric value to all two-card starting hands. For a first iteration, it should fulfill at least all the following:

AA > KK > AK
AKs > AKo
AKs ~= QQ
22 > A2o > 72.

This is surprisingly difficult.

After watching the World Series of Poker on TV in 2005, I decided that I would definitely play in the 2006 main event.

Fate had other ideas. As the World Series was starting last year, I was busy getting married. I’d like to pretend that was all there was to it. But, the truth was that I was still a pretty awful tournament player.

I’d had some good returns in tournaments. I won the money to buy my wife’s engagement ring in a St. Patrick’s Day tournament at the Tropicana in Atlantic City. I won smaller tournaments with some regularity at the Diamond Club when it was still around. At the time I decided to make the big push, I was net positive on tournaments in general. That changed pretty quickly. (more…)

At the risk of oversharing this early in our relationship, I have a confession to make: While I call myself the Poker Nerd and am primarily, I’m even more broadly obsessed with games in general. As I write this, I’m waiting for the second phase of a double shootout on Poker Stars while watching baseball with the back of my head, trying to broker a trade in my fantasy baseball league, and writing an e-mail about a turn-based play-by-email game.

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