Category: Poker

Howard “Tahoe” Andrew is a funny man

April 16th, 2011 3 comments

I went to a party recently where I ran into John Mugnani, floorman extraordinaire at the California Grand Casino. The next day John sent me an email with a story about our mutual ancient friend, Tahoe.

A guy walks up to Tahoe and says, “Listen to this terrible bad beat story that just happened to me.”

Tahoe says, “Did you lose with a royal flush?”

The guys says, “No.”

Tahoe replies, “Then I’ve heard it before.”

What the hell, as long we we’re here sharing Tahoe stories, this is a paragraph I wrote about Tahoe in 2001 in an article I wrote while I was at the WSOP:

Before the Senior’s event, Howard “Tahoe” Andrew said that no medication or walkers would be allowed during the tournament and that whoever was still breathing at the end would be the winner. Tahoe said he’s not taking any “last longer” bets.

A Client’s Poem

March 29th, 2011 3 comments

Today’s post is a poem a client wrote and sent to me. I asked if I could blog it. He said, “Yes, but please don’t include my name.”

Here it is…

Morning practice

I wake up, groggy and confused

Is it really time to get up?

I don’t want to

I turn over and sigh

When I get out of bed I have to be mindful

It always takes me a few minutes

The long process of coming out of hibernation

I rise and dress; go to the bathroom

I take my mat and my bench

and assume the position

I breathe in, and calm my body

I breathe out and smile

I try to be mindful first thing in the morning

For at least 10 minutes

Its not as easy as it sounds

Your body plays tricks on you

My forehead starts to itch, or I feel like I need to use the bathroom

Even though I just did

These things used to annoy me

Why are you fighting me, mind?

Now though, they just make me smile

I smile at the things my mind throws in my way

And I smile at myself

I know there is no fight here, except the one that I start

Baby You Can Drive My Site

March 7th, 2011 2 comments

I have a new website.

It has these really cool sliding thingies.

“Beep beep, beep beep, YEAH!”

The major new items at my new home page are:

What’s New – info and links about my latest books and projects

In Progress – projects in motion

Mailing List – sign up to get an occasional newsletter from me

It all started one year ago, with an email from Tom Fuertes. Tom wrote to request an inscribed copy of Elements of Poker. Then he made an offer I’d’ve been a fool to refuse.

Tom described himself as a “nerd barterer.” He offered a website upgrade in exchange for poker coaching. My site was old and clunky and in much need of modernization. Tom was young and spunky and ready to go full-time with poker. And now, one year later, Tom is playing poker for a living, and I love my new website. So at least one of us has been relieved from suffering.

Wendelin Montciel is known to most of the world as the artist who did the drawings for my “The Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightenment” series. She also designed the book cover for “A Rubber Band Story and Other Poker Tales” which you can see at the new In Progress pane.  And she provided much aesthetic oversight to my new website. Je t’aime bien, Wendelin!

Please feel free to come on by and kick the tires and look under the hood and take it for a spin, but please, whatever you do, don’t text and drive.

www.tommyangelo.com

My Clients Make Me POOP

February 3rd, 2011 3 comments

I have played a great deal of poker vicariously, through my clients. They send me hands they played, and we talk about them. All clients send me hands at the beginning, and some of them send me hands for years. I ask that the hands be written up in prose form, with analysis and feelings and whatever else thrown in. I ask for hands that went well, and hands that didn’t.

I study the hands and the comments, and I make some notes. Then we go over the hands in person or on the phone. I often talk about position at some point, working from my basic outline:

LAST = GOOD
NOT LAST = NOT GOOD

Which makes it even more surprising that it took me 7 years and 80 clients to spot this pattern: When a client tells me about a betting situation that was “uncomfortable,” or “annoying,” or “without good options,” chances are very good that the hand was POOP (Played Out Of Position, as in, not last).

As it happens, I’m not playing much poker these days, so when I analyze and discuss hands with a client, it gets my poker fever up. The old love blossoms. Just one problem. When I play poker, I am accustomed to being last to act on more streets than not. That’s how I like it. It’s easier and more profitable than the other way. But when I play poker vicariously through my clients, I’m usually POOP.

Or so it seemed. Not one to trust myself on this type of pattern discernment, I went in search of certainty. I thought about researching my suspicion by trolling client files and reading old hands. Then I thought of a less cumbersome way that could be fun and maybe even helpful.

The next three times that a client was about to send me some hands, I requested three uncomfortable hands. Hands that stuck in your craw, chapped your ass, made you wonder which end is up.

Of the nine hands sent to me, six were played out of position.

The first client sent three problem hands that were all POOP. I was happy to have the supporting data, and I was delighted to deliver my prepared bla bla bombastically: “Let this fact – that your problem hands are likely to be out of position hands – be a lesson to you about the true and inescapable nature of last and not-last!”

The second client, same thing. He POOPed on all three hands.

The third client, well, all three of his problem hands were hands he played on the button. His problem, according to him, was that he had been drinking too much and too often from the last-to-act bottle, before and after the flop. This struck me as analogous to someone eating too many vegetables.

“Okay,” I said. “So you were out of line on these hands and you made some negative EV plays that you knew were bad.”

“Right.”

“What I want to know is… Were you uncomfortable during the play of the hands? Did these hands meet the criteria I laid out?”

“No, they didn’t.” He said. “All three hands were relatively easy to play once I decided to play them.”

“Then I’d like to thank you twice. Once for providing data that I was able to twist until it supported my little conjecture. And also for sending me some hands on the button! POOP sucks, even on the phone!”

Nostalgia Corner: The 5 (and a bit) Stages Of Your Poker Career

January 13th, 2011 4 comments

Today’s post was written by guest writer Greg Walker.  This article is highly funny and relatable, if you happen to be an online poker degen. Greg runs thepokerbank.com, a Texas Hold’em strategy site.  Thanks Greg!

Nostalgia Corner: The 5 (and a bit) Stages Of Your Poker Career

Do you remember your early days of poker?

Either underage or barely legal, trying something new for the first time, desperate to earn some money on the side.

But that’s quite enough about my search history.

It was way before your $50 faux leather desk chair developed its groove (Moses couldn’t part foam padding like online poker can). The time when you had more real-life friends than “Internet friends”. It was also before your poker skills became inversely proportional to your general levels of health and fitness (you’ve still got the looks though – nothing’s ever going to take those looks away).

Yep, those days.

Feel free to brace yourself and join me for an awkward fumble through the past, present and future of your poker career, starting with…

1) Making your first deposit.

Hands up; who was thinking about the movie “Rounders” whilst they were making their first deposit? To be more specific, who was thinking about the “Judge’s game” scene?

Due to one of the small flaws of writing articles for the Internet, I can’t see or hear all your responses. However, I’ll safely assume that we just shared a collective sigh of agreement.

With more ambition than Hitler, you decided you were going to take over the poker world with your mad undiscovered poker skills. Not even legal gambling age laws were going to stop you.

This first deposit was a uniquely exciting and life-shifting experience for all of us. I’m sure you wonder what things would be like if you never dropped $50 at Party Poker. Probably not that much different if we’re being honest, but we can all dream. Either way, you certainly wouldn’t have experienced the pleasures of…

2) Losing your first deposit.

Damn.

How can you go from winning a steady $14/hour over 318 hands to losing everything? It was all going so swimmingly.

2a) Vowing to never play online poker again.

“Okay, that’s it. I’m wiping Party Poker off my PC completely.” *Drags Party Poker desktop shortcut to the Recycle Bin.*

For most of us this period lasted a few weeks at best. The problem was that you just couldn’t stop dreaming about outplaying opponents with absurd all-in shoves on the flop, not to mention cunning open limps with pocket aces UTG.

Thoughts of these devious, masterful plays build up until…

3) Your first comeback.

After skimming through a perfectly legal copy of Doyle Brunson’s Super System, you’re back.

Unfortunately, after a decent 2-week long run you end up losing another $50. Sorry, Doyle, but I don’t think JT suited is as invincible as you suggested. Nonetheless, the seed of degeneracy has been sown.

Figuratively speaking, you’ve opened that bag of Doritos and you’ve been stopped half way through. Not even a lack of hot salsa dip is going to prevent the inevitability of…

4) Your next comeback (with added seriousness).

This time, playing poker and learning strategy becomes an addiction.

You can’t stop yourself from consuming more and more poker until you’re a mental mess (or more so than usual). Countless hours are spent browsing/refreshing the 2p2 forums. You begin buying more books from Amazon than you’ve ever actually bought in your entire life. “2am” is now referred to as an “early night.”

You also no longer have to lock your door before “researching” something on Google. Well, not as much as before anyway.

I’m sure we’d all like to think that this super comeback was reminiscent of the cheesy Rocky IV montage of Stallone training in the wilderness. However, I don’t believe scenes consisting of being slouched in a desk chair surrounded by Subway wrappers would look quite as epic with “Hearts On Fire” in the background.

Nonetheless, the bottom line is your poker game improved significantly, even if everything else in your life regressed. In fairness though, it’s an impressive development when you look back at it from a hard-work and commitment point of view.

5+) The grind.

You’ve now “found your groove”, which is a euphemism for “hit a massive life plateau”.

Dreams of Champagne, Lobster and Cirque du Soleil turn into Red Bull, Ramen Noodles and Xbox.

The fact that the inside of your mouse now contains more dust than an urn is causing a slightly annoying tracking problem. The keyboard characters; p, m and / no longer work, but that’s okay because none of those are needed to type “wtf”, “fish”, “blonde” or “hardcore” anyway.

Your username is becoming more famous than your real name, and if you printed out a screenshot of your 2p2 post count you’d consider sticking it on the fridge with your other lifetime achievements.

Congratulations, you’re a reg.

Final thoughts.

Thanks for joining me for the uneasy shuffle down Memory Lane. I hope you didn’t mind the lengthy detour through Disappointment Avenue.

Not to worry though, you’re only ever one PokerStars Sunday Million away from greatness.

Now anyway, I have to head off. I believe my search history needs some deleting.

OMG THE EOP EBOOK IS FINALLY HERE!

November 30th, 2010 23 comments

EOP-cover-with-matrix-code
It’s been three years since my book Elements of Poker came out. Since then, I have received many emails that go something like this:

Dear Tommy,

If you don’t make Elements of Poker available as an eBook soon, I am going to nail my head to the floor.

Your fan,

Pat Hand

Welp, it’s done. The EOP eBook now exists. And here are just some of the things people are saying about it:

This saves me the embarrassment of requesting a large-print edition. — Lee Jones

Finally I have a legitimate reason to buy an iPad. — Phil Galfond

I like the print version better. — Johannes Gutenberg

Are you looking for the perfect gift for every poker player? Are you curious as to why Jay Rosenkrantz and Arthur Reber claim that EOP is the best poker book ever written? Do you suffer from eTilt? Then you should by all means click on one of these retailer links that go straight to their EOP page:

Kobo At Kobo, you can give a specific eBook as a gift.  The others offer gift cards.

Amazon.com Many customer reviews of EOP are at Amazon

iBooks

Barnes and Noble

Borders

Atlasbooks.com

The Pot of a Lifetime

November 16th, 2010 2 comments

Back when I was writing poker articles for magazines, I started about 5 articles for every one I finished. Many of them never grew any longer than a title and an idea. Others I worked on for months, on and off, but they never passed the larval stage. Then there were some, like the article below, that I completed, only to find out that there wasn’t much to say. They came out as dwarf articles, just the kind of thing that would be great for blogging. Except blogs didn’t exist back then. Thank goodness for data storage!

From 2001:

The Pot of a Lifetime

Here’s some twisted thinking that appeals to me on an emotional/romantic level.

I try like heck to operate entirely from cash on hand. By ‘operate’ I mean everything – buy-ins, rent, food, travel, concerts, everything.

When my cash runs out, I have to dig into reserves, and I hate hate hate that. My fear of digging creates an illusionary, arbitrary break point, or rather, broke point: when I won’t actually be broke, but I convince myself that I will be. My mental dance motivates me to take necessary measures – tighten up my game, cut back on frolicky expenditures, pray to the poker gods, even drop down in limit sometimes – whatever it takes, to avoid digging into my reserves.

It so happens I’ve currently gone a year or two without having to reload from the reserves. That is the definition of “success” in my wacky world.

A few weeks ago I was down to $1,300. Danger danger! I sat down to play $20-40 limit hold’em and I bought in for the whole $1,300 (2.6 racks). If I went bust this session, I’d have to dig. A few hours later, I was down to my last $130, planning to finish out the current lap and quit on my next big blind because I was too shortstacked already. I’d be pretty much giving away my last nub if I kept playing. I’ve seen others do it a million times, and I’ve done it plenty too. Looks like tomorrow I’ll be at the bank, reloading. Oh well, so it goes.

I folded the next few hands, and when it was my big blind, I thought, man, I’ve got a firm policy against going all-in at limit, but I sure don’t want to go to the bank, so maybe I’ll get lucky and turn my molehill into a mountain. I folded both blinds before the flop, so now I had $100 left when I picked up king-six suited on the button and five people limped, so I did too. I flopped a flush draw and I was all-in on the turn and bingo, I hit my flush on the river.

Ten hours later, I cashed out $2,000. After that I ran good for a while and now my operational cash is back up to $10,000 or so, and this morning, it occurred to me…

What if I never have to dig into my current reserves again? That would mean I had lived the rest of my life off that last $100. That K6 hand could turn out to be the pot of a lifetime.

ZZZ Game

September 14th, 2010 3 comments

Today I would like to share an email I received from my friend Gary Christy.

Gary wrote:

After work last night. Exhausted. Sleepy. Decided to give my poker itch the most minimal scratch—an $11 turbo sit-n-go. Folded twenty or so hands… and fell asleep in my chair, head slumping. My speakers were off, so I wasn’t awakened by any beeps or anything… but I did wake up eventually. There were four of us remaining—I was on the bubble! I was low stack, of course, and my big blind was coming up next. Two red Kings! Wow, what timing! Flop black rags, turn black blank, river black deuce.

Turns out, his pocket deuces were red, too. 

You convinced me to work on my A game. You urged me to work on my C game… but you never warned me about my ZZZ game.

Medding

August 15th, 2010 10 comments

“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.”

“Monks are medders who med all day.”

“I haven’t medded all day and I feel like crap.”

“Poker and medding do mix.”

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

Me at the WSOP

July 3rd, 2010 3 comments

Me-at-WSOP

.