Heres some reading material for y'all, I'll post a massive self undulgent moan about my own recent misfourtunes later
A BIG DEAL
Dec 19th 2007
Poker is getting younger, cleverer, duller and much, much richer
DOYLE BRUNSON (above, left) is a poker legend. Twice winner of the
game's most prestigious annual tournament, the World Series of Poker
(WSOP), held in Las Vegas, the cowboy-hat-clad southerner
affectionately known as Texas Dolly also wrote what many consider to be
the bible of poker theory, "Super System: A Course in Power Poker". His
reputation among card-shufflers borders on the superhuman. Indeed,
after fighting off supposedly terminal cancer in the 1960s, he
celebrated his return to the cardrooms with 53 straight wins. Adding to
the mystique, both of his World Series titles were won with exactly the
same cards: a full house of tens over twos.
Now in his mid-70s, Mr Brunson is still going strong. But not strong
enough for Annette Obrestad (above, right), who beat the old master and
361 other entrants in September to win the first ever WSOP event held
outside America. Miss Obrestad's victory, which netted her GBP1m ($2m),
shows how much poker has changed since the days when Texas Dolly,
Amarillo Slim Preston and Jack "Treetops" Straus held sway. She is only
19 (making her the youngest ever winner of a World Series bracelet) and
she is, of course, a woman. She hails from Norway, not Nevada. And
though she had previously won over $800,000 in internet tournaments,
the event at London's Empire Casino was the first time she had
encountered serious opposition in the flesh. The poker press refers to
her by her online moniker, annette_15.
Miss Obrestad's route to the grand prize--dumped on the final table in
bundles of $50 notes, as is the World Series tradition--required her to
see off such modern-day poker luminaries as Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, a
hirsute scholar of game theory, Dave "Devilfish" Ulliott, a somewhat
less cerebral but wily British professional who wears diamond-encrusted
knuckledusters, and Phil "Poker Brat" Hellmuth, arguably the most
celebrated (not least by himself) modern player. Jim McManus, a poker
player and historian, describes the young Scandinavian's win as a
"startling milestone".
Yet it is also part of a trend. Youngsters are flocking to poker as
never before, attracted by its growing cachet and the ever-expanding
pots. The plethora of books, blogs and DVDs now easily accessible, and
the rapid growth of poker online, means newcomers can learn the art
much more quickly than in earlier eras. "When I started out it took
years of hard grind at the table to get good. Now the learning curve is
much steeper," says Howard "The Professor" Lederer, a professional
player. It is often said that while Texas Hold 'Em, the most popular
version of poker, may take only minutes to learn, it takes a lifetime
to master. Annette_15 may beg to differ.
The threat to the old guard from quick-learning online players first
became apparent in 2003, when the aptly named Chris Moneymaker won the
World Series after qualifying through a satellite tournament for
players on a poker website. He turned his $40 fee (a tiny fraction of
the $10,000 "buy-in" for the pros) into $2.5m, finishing off his final
opponent with a colossal bluff. This year's winner in Vegas, Jerry
Yang, qualified the same way. After two weeks of intense play, with
daily sessions lasting up to 16 hours, the 39-year-old psychologist
went home $8.25m richer, promising to give much of it to charity. No
other sporting competition (if poker can be called a sport) offers the
same reward.
Popular websites such as Full Tilt Poker[1] and PokerStars[2] enjoy
peak traffic of tens of thousands of visitors at any given time,
occasionally over 100,000. Full Tilt offers visitors the chance to try
their wits against a roster of professionals, who play under their own
names and are paid according to how well known they are. Poker sites
employ some of the snazziest software on the web. They also offer a
dizzying array of blogs and forums, which debate everything from
"slowplaying" (playing a strong hand with deceptive passivity) to
Morton's Theorem (don't ask). One recent discussion had more than 1,600
participants. No wonder it is often said that poker has done more than
anything apart from pornography to develop the web.
STAR OF THE SMALL SCREEN
The other force fuelling poker's growth is television. The game has
grown rapidly on the small screen since camera crews worked out a way
to show the "hole cards" (those dealt face down to each player) using
miniature cameras positioned beneath specially designed tables with
glass panels. This allowed viewers to see each hand's dynamics as they
unfolded. Televised celebrity games have added to poker's appeal. Ben
Affleck, Toby Maguire and James Woods are among those who consider
themselves accomplished amateurs. Mr Affleck even hired a pro to help
him raise his game, and subsequently won California's state poker
tournament.
Today poker is the third most watched sport on cable television in the
United States, after car racing and American football, trumping even
NBA basketball. In America, it is regularly aired on ESPN and the
Travel Channel, while Britain has its own poker channel. ESPN's World
Series shows regularly get more than 1m viewers, and numbers hold up
well even during the busiest sports periods, such as during the
major-league baseball play-offs and the NASCAR motorsports season.
The poker economy has never been flusher. There are an estimated
60m-80m regular players in America and perhaps 80m-100m elsewhere.
Poker is by far the largest chunk of the online gambling market, which
had worldwide revenues of around $15 billion in 2006--a figure that may
be closer to $20 billion this year. Poker chips are among the
best-selling items on Amazon.com. What was once the preserve of either
high-rollers or low-lifes is now being roundly embraced by the mass of
ordinary folk in between.
The changing of the guard at the top of poker reflects this move into
the mainstream. Harrah's, the casino operator that runs the WSOP, has
brought in Jeffrey Pollack, a former NASCAR executive, to smooth its
image and entice in corporate money. He has revamped the website[3],
wrung more money out of ESPN and put poker on the radio (where it works
surprisingly well). More impressively, he has lured dozens of
sponsors--including Hershey's chocolate, Milwaukee's Best Light beer
and Planters peanuts ("the nuts" being the term for an unbeatable hand
of cards)--into a game that many consider morally questionable.
Mr Pollack says his aim is to run the WSOP, which was conceived in the
late 1960s, as a "38-year-old start-up", constantly innovating and
pushing into less developed markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
An annual tournament in Macau is likely to be the next move. That would
put the World Series head to head with the new Asia Pacific Poker Tour,
which is sponsored by the PokerStars website[4]. In some Asian
countries, such as Thailand, poker is illegal. But China is a
potentially huge market, and the game has exploded in popularity in
Australia. Some 400,000 Australians joined poker leagues after Joe
Hachem, from Melbourne, won the World Series in 2005. That burst of
activity prompted a government inquiry.
Another largely untapped market is women. They make up only around one
in 20 of all tournament entrants, though Miss Obrestad's victory is
likely to encourage more to take the plunge. Mr McManus, who teaches a
poker course at a Chicago college, says his female students have just
as much of a feel for the game as his male ones. But he also thinks men
have the edge in no-limit Texas Hold 'Em, which relies more heavily
than other forms of poker on aggression and the willingness to risk
everything on a single hand.
Some of the game's most eloquent player-commentators are women, notably
Annie Duke, who has won more than $3m in prize money, and Victoria
Coren, winner of the London leg of last year's European Poker Tour and
author of a poker column in Britain's GUARDIAN. Ms Coren describes
poker as "a stimulating psychological challenge, combining guts and
detective work...a world of its own, offering all the childish appeal
of secret places, special languages and staying up late at night." It
is hard to imagine Mr "Devilfish" Ulliott describing it that way.
Both would agree, however, that the best players display a good deal of
skill, and that poker is a long way from basic forms of gambling such
as roulette or lotteries. The object, says Ms Coren, is to control the
swings of luck with skill, figuring out how to win the maximum with
your luckiest hands and lose the minimum with your unluckiest ones.
The skill-versus-luck debate has crackled back to life because of the
passage of a law last year, sneakily tacked on to a port-security bill,
which sought to bolster existing legislation against internet wagering
by blocking Americans' access to accounts that can be used to gamble
online. All games that are "predominantly" subject to chance were
covered by the ban. Poker was included. For reasons best explained by
lobbyists, horse racing, fantasy sports and lotteries were exempted.
This discrepancy had already landed America in hot water at the World
Trade Organisation, thanks to a case brought by tiny Antigua, home to
several online gambling sites.
America's Department of Labour has given a nod to the element of skill,
in some eyes, by last year recognising "professional poker player" as
an official occupation. Courts, however, tend to view poker as a game
of chance. That, Mr Lederer is convinced, is only because the opposing
arguments have been botched at the bench.
As he concedes, it is hard to argue that a seasoned professional will
beat a first-timer in any given hand. But there is evidence aplenty
that, over the long run, a player with a head for calculating odds and
a feel for the psychology of the game, such as bluffing, will always
overcome an untalented opponent.
The skill, Mr Lederer argues, is in the betting. And it is apparent in
the fact that you can win without the best hand. More than half of all
hands end without the cards being shown, not because one player got
lucky but because he managed to persuade the others, given their
analysis of the available information and the size of the pot, that it
was sensible to fold. When no one declares their hand, can it really be
argued that the outcome was determined by luck?
At the highest level, decisions about betting, bluffing and folding are
based on the complex juggling of probabilities. "What drew me to poker
is that it is essentially an academic endeavour," says Ms Duke. She is
one of a growing group of full-time players who came to poker through
game theory and mathematics, not through any love of a flutter.
(Indeed, she never plays craps or roulette.) Others include Mr Lederer
(her brother) and Mr Ferguson, who has a doctorate in computer science
and writes academic papers on probability theory with his father, a
statistician at UCLA.
Thomas Bihl, winner of a recent HORSE tournament, in which players have
to show mastery of five different styles of poker, thinks the game has
more in common with finance than it does with basic forms of gambling,
because it requires the constant pricing and repricing of risk. Mr
Bihl, a former stock trader, says the move from his old job into poker
was a natural progression. Though his GBP71,000 win was "a huge lift",
he says that he is motivated not by money but by the chance to use his
brain to outfox opponents. This is a common refrain among regular
players. As Ms Coren put it in a recent article: "Cash is nothing more
than chips, just the tools of the trade, like fishing rods to an
angler. The game is all about money, and nothing to do with money."
Those who think skill predominates also point to the fact that some
players excel at the game while others don't. Dan Harrington made the
final table of the WSOP in both 2003 and 2004, the odds of which would
be 25,000 to one if it were down to chance. Stu "The Kid" Ungar, a
brilliant player with a self-destructive streak, won three times in not
many more attempts before succumbing to drugs.
Moreover, when wealthy amateurs pit their wits against professional
players steeped in poker theory, more often than not they lose their
shirts. In a number of sessions beginning in 2001, Andy Beal, a
Dallas-based banker, locked horns with a syndicate of pros, including
Mr Lederer, convinced that he could come out on top. He did not.
Nevertheless, luck is important. It blends with skill to produce a game
that is "much like life, full of incomplete information and
second-guessing," says Mr Lederer. Poker is certainly more exciting to
most than chess, a game of complete information and limited psychology
where the better player always wins. Tellingly, whereas computers can
be programmed to play chess at the highest level, they still have a
long way to go to match expert players in poker games with more than
two participants. The best attempt so far, Polaris, developed by
researchers at the University of Alberta, failed to get the better of
two top players, Ali Eslami and Phil "Unabomber" Laak (who plays
hooded).
Moreover, professionals say that poker's generous dollop of luck is
good for them on balance, because it attracts money from neophytes who
fancy their chances of beating the top players in tournaments. Some
pros disparagingly call such players "ATMs". But, as Mr Moneymaker
showed, the newcomers occasionally win big. His victory in 2003 led to
a surge in entrants for the World Series main event from 512 in 2000 to
8,773 in 2006. A dip this year to 6,358 reflected the new American
law's effective ban on internet sites buying satellite-competition
winners into the tournament. (Some tried to get around this by sending
the winners cheques instead, but most recipients simply held on to the
money rather than using it to buy themselves in.)
"It doesn't take most young people long to realise they won't be the
next Michael Jordan. But they can all aspire to be the next Phil
Hellmuth, and they don't even have to work out," says Mr Hellmuth,
slurping a full-cream mocha. He then quickly points out that poker
requires a great deal of mental stamina, and that he promotes an energy
drink.
POKER FOR PUPILS
Parents are increasingly encouraging their children to play, he adds,
because it is mentally more rewarding than video games and does not mix
well with alcohol (at least if you care about winning). "When I started
it was seen as a bit of an outlaw pastime, for rogues and cheats. Now
it's a huge bottom-up movement," he says.
It might seem a bit of a leap to go from here to putting poker on the
curriculum. But some academics see it as a worthy subject of study.
Chief among them is Charles Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School.
Earlier this year he founded the Global Poker Strategic Thinking
Society (GPSTS), whose awkward name belies a clear set of goals: to
highlight poker's role in teaching patience, strategy and money
management, and in improving cognitive skills. "Poker offers metaphors
for a range of life skills and could be a wonderful educational tool,"
says Mr Nesson, who plays a regular game with other law professors,
including Alan Dershowitz--though he has yet to play with Antonin
Scalia, a Supreme Court justice known to have a fondness for poker.
Poker is, first and foremost, a game of managing resources, argues Mr
Nesson, teaching a cautious approach to risk-taking, not recklessness.
There is some evidence for this. One study, comparing experienced poker
players with financial- market traders, found the players less likely
to exhibit over-confidence.
AN UNLIKELY SOCIAL-WELFARE TOOL
Determined to counter what he sees as the demonisation of poker by the
American right, and the resulting squeeze on personal freedoms, Mr
Nesson is working on a pilot programme to teach the game to
disadvantaged children in schools in America and Jamaica. He muses
about turning a property he runs in Second Life, a virtual world, into
an online poker university.
Ms Duke sees other ways in which poker teaches "life skills". It taught
her, for instance, how to be a good loser ("Even the best lose most of
the hands they play. If you let that get to you, it will kill you"
.
She says she even uses poker theory when dealing with her children: "I
always bet the minimum when making a threat. If you say no TV rather
than no Disneyland, you can always raise later."
By enlisting the help of players, statisticians, law students and lobby
groups such as the Poker Players Alliance, whose membership has swollen
to 860,000, Mr Nesson hopes to roll back not only the federal ban on
online gambling but also the worst bits of the nonsensical patchwork of
state laws. Massachusetts law, for instance, makes it hard for the
university to hold even a charity poker tournament. "Are they afraid
that people will become addicted to giving money to good causes?" asks
Andrew Woods, a Harvard student who helps to run the GPSTS.
As the pokeristas sharpen their legal arguments, they are hoping for
some extra help from the statisticians. Online poker sites have reams
of game-by-game data. These could, in theory, be used to show what
makes some players better than others, and what defines their skill
(Bluffing? Shrewd betting based on the rapid calculation of odds? Or
both?). Though research in this area has been thin on the ground to
date, number-crunchers are starting to rise to the challenge.
Among them is Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago
and author of "Freakonomics". He oversees a project called Pokernomics.
It aims to collect millions of hands (which players can store using
readily available tracking software) and analyse them systematically in
the hope of answering questions. Does a big stack of chips allow
players to bully others and win even more? To what extent does position
relative to the dealer matter? Are there simple strategies that can be
used to win money even with losing hands?
These efforts may produce fascinating results. Or they might reveal
nothing much. Even if the data highlight strong trends, it may still
not be clear which are caused by skill and which by luck, says Jay
Kadane, a statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who
studies games.
Perhaps a better way to win over judges and lawmakers would be to
highlight poker's place in the American psyche. Introduced by French
colonials, as a game called poque, it soon spread from its original
base in the Mississippi delta. By the late 19th century it had become a
prominent cultural facet across the country, not only in the South or
Wild West. Much ink has been spilled analysing its appeal to Americans.
The answer may lie no deeper than Walter Matthau's one-liner about
poker exemplifying "the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our
country so great".
Poker has long fascinated America's great and good, from politicians to
generals to captains of industry. Presidents Roosevelt (both), Truman,
Eisenhower and Nixon were all keen players. Nixon was famously good:
most of the funding for his first congressional run came from poker
winnings. Poker was said to have inspired cold-war tacticians. It is
still a useful military motif: recall the playing cards used to
represent Saddam Hussein and his most-wanted cohorts. Poker financed a
sizeable chunk of Microsoft's start-up costs. Bill Gates once said he
learned more about business strategy at the baize than in
classrooms--though these days he apparently prefers the more stately
game of bridge.
Not all famous players have made such good role models. As he partied
away the declining years of his career, Errol Flynn incurred some
excruciating poker losses, including, on one particularly bad night, a
Caribbean island he had hoped to develop into a holiday resort. John
Wayne had some shockers too, though in one memorable game he won Lassie
from the canine star's desperate owner.
GETTING SERIOUS
What would Nixon, Flynn and Wayne have made of poker today? They would
surely have marvelled at the transformation of "the cheater's game"
into a multi-billion-dollar industry, pumping out new millionaires
almost daily. Even they might have been shocked at the latest season of
"High Stakes Poker", a television series in which players buy into each
game for $500,000 apiece and the winner takes home more than $5m.
They might, perhaps, have been disappointed that the game had lost some
of its backroom edginess. Miss Obrestad's generation are more likely to
put their excess winnings into tax-free bonds than blow them betting on
a single round of golf, as Mr Brunson and his Las Vegas pals used to do
in their madder moments. Still, those hoping to win over poker's
sceptics will find no better example than young annette_15. She is
stern, sober and chillingly focused on her game. She appears to be
exceptionally good at it too. Either that or amazingly lucky.
-----
![[quote]](http://static.biggie.co.nz/img/dis/message_quote.png "Quote message"){kind=small}
To much much worse
Im now going back to grinding the SNG's and picking up a bit more "real work" until I get my mojo back anmd plug a few leaks in my game. I kinds got bored with the game and stopped watching the play. I didnt quite go broke, I actually made a decent pile of $$ in 2007 (as anyone can see from my Official Poker Rankings stats) .... but a few more months of that luck and I would have
cant work those out. Full Tilt doesnt do final table dealing making AFAIK 
I was so paranoid about going near any poker sites this year attempting not to find out the winner of the WSOP 2007...
I'll probably play the daily double at 3pm. get in there you dirties! 
