The Willinois Nation would like to congratulate the Poker Players Alliance in hitting the million members mark. The more members the PPA has, the more of a voice they will have fighting the good fight to legalize on-line poker.
We post many stories of police spending time and tax payer money bust home poker games when they could be, I don’t know, protecting the public from real crimes. Here is one that, although I’d have like to play at, they might have had a reason to bust.
Games were set up several times a week, with high-entry stakes the norm. Anderson even took credit cards. Laurie Anderson, a professional stripper, dealt for some of the games and served liquor, often topless. Balotin was a hired dealer; the Andersons also had a bouncer working the door.
If you’ve never played poker or are relatively new to the game, here is the number 1 rule you must remember:
POKER IS NOT ABOUT RESULTS, IT ABOUT CORRECT DECISIONS!
Example 1: You first to act in a tournament with 7-2 off suit. You call the big blind. Another player who plays very few hands bets 5 times the big blind. Everyone folds to you and you call. The Flop comes down 7-7-2 and you win a big pot. You smile as you rake in the chips. You think how good you are.
Example 2: Same situation. This time you fold your 7-2 off suit. The flop again comes 7-7-2. You think, “Damn, I should have played that hand. I suck.”
Here is the thing. You think you made the wrong decision, but it’s the decision that you made pre-flop you should base your play. This is because poker is a game that is judged over the long-haul, not on a hand-by-hand, or ever a game-by-game bases. If you kick yourself for not playing 7-2, or pride yourself on playing it, you will lose more than you will win over time.
A 7-2 off suit against a an over pair, that’s a pair of eights or higher, your only about 11% chance to win preflop. That mean you will lose more than 80% of the time. The same hand against a suited connector like 9-10 of clubs, you only have a 27% of winning, and against a hand like 10-king off suit, about a 31%. You can see in the long run, playing this hand is not a profitable move. If you’d like to try this yourself, Card Player has a very good odds calculator.
I can here you now . . . “But I saw Gus Hanson play that hand on the WPT!” He probably did but you must remember, Gus in a math wiz and is figuring a lot more into his decision such as pot odds and implied odds. If you are reading this and using Gus as a argument, you not ready for such concepts. There are some rare occasions when it might be all right.
Underbelly’s Bottom Line: When you bust out of a tournament and you have those losing hands playing over and over in your head, ask yourself, did I make the right decision? If the answer id “yes” than you doing ok. Of course there is always the possibility that you think you played the hand correct but didn’t. That for another day.
North Carolina — Nearly 20 people charged in a high-stakes poker game have pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of unlawful gaming and were fined.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who once declared a ban on online gambling “one of the stupidest things I ever saw,” will use a hearing this spring to highlight the headaches he says anti-gambling regulations have created for banks and other financial institutions.
