That guy
06-27-2005, 12:50 PM
June 25, 2005
Inside America's Other Favorite Pastime
By JAMES McMANUS
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn poker. The game, after all, has gone hand in hand with our history for almost two centuries now. Since its development on Mississippi riverboats, poker - with its risk-loving bravado - has echoed the ways we've done battle and business.
With its frontier spirit intact, poker is now our most popular card game - maybe our favorite game, period - though because of our Puritan strain, we remain nervous about it. Judges and presidents play, and tournaments are broadcast on Super Bowl Sunday. In many jurisdictions, however, even low-stakes action is subject to raids by the police.
As I write this first column on the world of poker, thousands have arrived at the Rio Casino and Hotel, just off the Las Vegas Strip, to compete in 44 preliminary events at the World Series of Poker, the first one not held at Binion's Horseshoe. (That downtown casino had been home to the series since 1970, but last year Harrah's, which runs the Rio, bought the rights from the Binion family.)
On June 3 the first open event, no-limit Hold'em with a $1,500 buy-in, drew 2,305 piranhas - maybe 300 tournament pros, the rest inspired amateurs - to the Rio's Amazon Room, a tournament area bigger than a football field. Two days later, Allen Cunningham, a Los Angeles pro, had his third World Series bracelet and the $725,405 first prize. (Results and live updates are available on CardPlayer.com.) More than 6,000 hopefuls are expected to pay $10,000 apiece for a seat in the main event, July 7 to July 15, generating a prize pool of more than $60 million.
Meanwhile, more than 250 online poker sites offer the chance to contest pots with players from Bangalore, India, to Caracas, Venezuela, any time of day or night. Weekly home games also continue to flourish, and this column will cover those, too. I'll report from major tournaments, review instructional primers and try to give a sense of how poker's lore and lingo permeate the action today.
Early on I will focus on Texas Hold'em, the game that transformed a back-room activity into a lucrative spectator sport. Each player gets two cards face down, to be combined with five community cards dealt face up in the middle - the first three simultaneously (called the flop), then a fourth (the turn), then a fifth (the river) - to make the best five-card hand.
It's intrinsically beautiful. Since you share five-sevenths of your cards with your opponents, the difference between the best and the second-best hand - all the difference in the world, bankrollwise - is quite a bit subtler than in seven-card stud. Even more crucial, stud is always played with fixed bet sizes, whereas Hold'em, with four betting rounds instead of five, has traditionally lent itself to a no-limit format.
Hold'em was apparently born in Texas about 80 years ago, when a dozen or so cowboys wanted to play a little poker but found that they had only one deck. The most creative cowboy must have got to thinking: If five cards were shared by all players, each could be dealt a two-card hand. Though poker and its 52-card deck had long roots in France, he probably did not drawl, "Voilá."
The game was brought to Vegas in 1963, and by April 1970 Benny Binion and his fellow high-rolling Texans had chosen it as one of five poker forms in the inaugural World Series. Since 1972, the main event has been a $10,000 no-limit Hold'em freezeout, which continues until one player wins all the chips.
Why no limit? Because when you can bet any amount of your chips in any round, experts have more leverage to win pots without the best hand. A simple but common example: Early in the main event, you raise with pocket kings, also known as wired cowboys or ace magnets.
Everyone else folds but a tough Vegas professional - gulp - who calls. He's not only riffling a tall stack of chips, but he has position on you: acting second in the clockwise rotation, he knows what you've done before he makes his move. And here comes a flop you don't like: eight of diamonds, ace of hearts, ten of clubs. If you check, the pro (with five and four of diamonds) is likely to bet about the size of the pot. If you had bet that amount, he might have folded, but there's also a pretty good chance he would raise enough to put you all-in.
How could he do that with nothing, you ask? Because he knows how to leverage uncertainty. Even when the flop misses his five-four by a mile, he can fairly deduce that it missed yours too: most flops do. He can also sense weakness. A no-limit artist can't peer into your soul to see those kings, but he can often tell when you're less than in love with the flop, since body language and betting patterns betray things like that. He's also inured to risking $10,000 on the turn of a card; you aren't, so your emotional temperature is more apt to spike. He's put you on (made an educated guess that you have a pair below aces), and he's looking to seize the initiative. You know he's probably bluffing, but the ace, plus the genuine possibility that he's flopped two pairs or three of a kind, make it hard to risk your $10,000 buy-in by calling.
In limit Hold'em, or no-limit played for small stakes, he couldn't put you under nearly as much pressure, and that's what his game is about. You might fold your kings when he bets. You could also play a small pot simply by calling him down: checking and calling single bets on the turn and the river.
But if you like more precipitous risk-reward ratios, no-limit freezeouts may be the cure for what ails you. More than 90 percent of entrants lose their buy-in, but the opportunistic (and lucky) players who survive to the end multiply their investment by a very big number. They also get to sport cool gold bracelets.
Inside America's Other Favorite Pastime
By JAMES McMANUS
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn poker. The game, after all, has gone hand in hand with our history for almost two centuries now. Since its development on Mississippi riverboats, poker - with its risk-loving bravado - has echoed the ways we've done battle and business.
With its frontier spirit intact, poker is now our most popular card game - maybe our favorite game, period - though because of our Puritan strain, we remain nervous about it. Judges and presidents play, and tournaments are broadcast on Super Bowl Sunday. In many jurisdictions, however, even low-stakes action is subject to raids by the police.
As I write this first column on the world of poker, thousands have arrived at the Rio Casino and Hotel, just off the Las Vegas Strip, to compete in 44 preliminary events at the World Series of Poker, the first one not held at Binion's Horseshoe. (That downtown casino had been home to the series since 1970, but last year Harrah's, which runs the Rio, bought the rights from the Binion family.)
On June 3 the first open event, no-limit Hold'em with a $1,500 buy-in, drew 2,305 piranhas - maybe 300 tournament pros, the rest inspired amateurs - to the Rio's Amazon Room, a tournament area bigger than a football field. Two days later, Allen Cunningham, a Los Angeles pro, had his third World Series bracelet and the $725,405 first prize. (Results and live updates are available on CardPlayer.com.) More than 6,000 hopefuls are expected to pay $10,000 apiece for a seat in the main event, July 7 to July 15, generating a prize pool of more than $60 million.
Meanwhile, more than 250 online poker sites offer the chance to contest pots with players from Bangalore, India, to Caracas, Venezuela, any time of day or night. Weekly home games also continue to flourish, and this column will cover those, too. I'll report from major tournaments, review instructional primers and try to give a sense of how poker's lore and lingo permeate the action today.
Early on I will focus on Texas Hold'em, the game that transformed a back-room activity into a lucrative spectator sport. Each player gets two cards face down, to be combined with five community cards dealt face up in the middle - the first three simultaneously (called the flop), then a fourth (the turn), then a fifth (the river) - to make the best five-card hand.
It's intrinsically beautiful. Since you share five-sevenths of your cards with your opponents, the difference between the best and the second-best hand - all the difference in the world, bankrollwise - is quite a bit subtler than in seven-card stud. Even more crucial, stud is always played with fixed bet sizes, whereas Hold'em, with four betting rounds instead of five, has traditionally lent itself to a no-limit format.
Hold'em was apparently born in Texas about 80 years ago, when a dozen or so cowboys wanted to play a little poker but found that they had only one deck. The most creative cowboy must have got to thinking: If five cards were shared by all players, each could be dealt a two-card hand. Though poker and its 52-card deck had long roots in France, he probably did not drawl, "Voilá."
The game was brought to Vegas in 1963, and by April 1970 Benny Binion and his fellow high-rolling Texans had chosen it as one of five poker forms in the inaugural World Series. Since 1972, the main event has been a $10,000 no-limit Hold'em freezeout, which continues until one player wins all the chips.
Why no limit? Because when you can bet any amount of your chips in any round, experts have more leverage to win pots without the best hand. A simple but common example: Early in the main event, you raise with pocket kings, also known as wired cowboys or ace magnets.
Everyone else folds but a tough Vegas professional - gulp - who calls. He's not only riffling a tall stack of chips, but he has position on you: acting second in the clockwise rotation, he knows what you've done before he makes his move. And here comes a flop you don't like: eight of diamonds, ace of hearts, ten of clubs. If you check, the pro (with five and four of diamonds) is likely to bet about the size of the pot. If you had bet that amount, he might have folded, but there's also a pretty good chance he would raise enough to put you all-in.
How could he do that with nothing, you ask? Because he knows how to leverage uncertainty. Even when the flop misses his five-four by a mile, he can fairly deduce that it missed yours too: most flops do. He can also sense weakness. A no-limit artist can't peer into your soul to see those kings, but he can often tell when you're less than in love with the flop, since body language and betting patterns betray things like that. He's also inured to risking $10,000 on the turn of a card; you aren't, so your emotional temperature is more apt to spike. He's put you on (made an educated guess that you have a pair below aces), and he's looking to seize the initiative. You know he's probably bluffing, but the ace, plus the genuine possibility that he's flopped two pairs or three of a kind, make it hard to risk your $10,000 buy-in by calling.
In limit Hold'em, or no-limit played for small stakes, he couldn't put you under nearly as much pressure, and that's what his game is about. You might fold your kings when he bets. You could also play a small pot simply by calling him down: checking and calling single bets on the turn and the river.
But if you like more precipitous risk-reward ratios, no-limit freezeouts may be the cure for what ails you. More than 90 percent of entrants lose their buy-in, but the opportunistic (and lucky) players who survive to the end multiply their investment by a very big number. They also get to sport cool gold bracelets.