Episode #463 - June 14th, 2017

Live from the Two Plus Two Studios - This week on the Pokercast: Poker vlogger/youtuber Andrew Neeme joins us to talk about his work and grinding Vegas. To begin we chat about D-Negs fantasy team, The Alan Boston fund, Pokercast Fantasy league and more. In the first segment we are also joined by Andrew Neeme. A poker pro hailing from Michigan, Andrew now lives in Vegas and plays live cash for a living. We get into his poker history and why he decided to begin documenting his life, problems with trying to film in the casino, the life of a live pro and more.
In the news: Lots of poker bracelets have been awarded by now at the WSOP and we talk about all of them, 2 poker villains play the tag team event, more US online poker legislation passes and more. In the second segment we dive into Terrence's trip to Vegas so far and the events he has played, and have a discussion/rant about the ethics of tanking on the bubble. We’ve got some WSOP themed 140 or less and some of your wonderful mail as well!

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Polish, according to the pic and the pronunciation.

Great show guys! Adam for the final furlong Walk Walk and more Walking............ plenty of sunlight too , dont push yourself too much your body is very intellegent.

I got ready for a great night out at the poker casino, some slow guy every F**king hand. I said to him "Hey man, I will need to have another shave in a minute hurry the fk up!

Just back from Vegas, and got a new show? Awesome.

Adam. Way to go on the weight loss. You're killing it. Keep this up and BP is writing a check at the end of the year. Is our old host trying to buy out? Your 180 bet is a lock. Keep on it, and you're there. Also really hope that you're felling way better. Can you tell the difference? Like TChan said, wear those before pictures with pride.

TCHan, loved your talk about stalling. You're not alone. Agree with your points in the NVG thread, but don't hate myself enough to post in NVG What I got out of this is that MTT pros are going to find out that this is why they can't have nice things -- with a good stack, the bubble is super profitable by stealing from bad rec players who don't adjust. To keep that, they have to stop this "very profitable stalling" because it literally ruins poker. The nuclear option is to just flatten out the bubble and remove the reason to stall, and let's hope that some of these guys get what they deserve... losing a bunch of their edge because they can't avoid ruining poker.

One of the NVG threads had a guy whining about getting a floorman calling the clock on him and he only got ~40 seconds to act in a single raised NL cash pot (maybe he was CO vs MP raise). You'll understand this, all the LHE cash guys laughed. The consensus was that in a 40 or 80 game, 40 seconds after the CO had his turn preflop, the dealer would be flipping over the turn. If people hate tanking, head over to the Bellagio and try a limit game. They'll be amazed how quickly hands are over.

Hey guys just listening to the new ep.

On the Lon/play-by-play subject, I think props are due to Tony Dunst, who was purely an analyst but has now done enough streams as the play by play guy and also will take over from Mike Sexton for the TV show.

Otherwise I'm a big fan of Lon, Tuchman, and Stapleton and think they all do a great job in their own particular way. The thing that all three and Tony all do well is to work with analysts, some of whom have never done any broadcasting at all, and get them comfortable, prime them with good questions, etc., all the while keeping the whole broadcast moving along. Poker is a special beast as well - streams often continue for 5-6-7 or more hours... a lot longer than most play by play guys have to deal with. And with huge stretches of not much going on... big respect.

The Seidel tweet was a reference to Liv and Igor deciding, before they entered, to donate 50% of winnings.
That's why I retweeted it at you!

Good show. Got a mountain of new entertainment from Andrew on YouTube, enjoyed an hour of it last night.

I got a laugh out of Adam clarifying that David "The Dragon" is not a real dragon. But if he had been, then Ross could have worked in another Game of Thrones reference.

There's an even better line just before the outro. When they couldn't hear T on the line, Ross says

Various ...

* The structure of the h/u was talked about a few times on the stream. The general reaction was it starts really deep, it ends really shallow; you see them play at all levels. So, yeah, it ends a 15-20BB shovefest, but there is a lot of play for the first hour. I'm meh on that argument, but it does warrant thinking about.

* H/u is so variance. I watched 3 matches, in each one, the guy who was, imo, clearly better, you know, lost.

* Stalling sucks (but not as much as Legionnaire's Disease). Why isn't the solve as simple as a shot clock?

* Re: the Brazilian masseuse. You know the cameras over the tables don't work when the guy in Seat 2 angles you, but the bathroom cameras are fully functional at all times. Just saying.

Good show!

Great post overall, but especially the bolded part. This is the part that most complainers flat-out don't get.

I'm not a professional broadcaster, and my actual job involves writing about sports rather than speaking about it into a mic. However, I've done a decent amount of radio play-by-play over the years, both on the traditional airwaves and streaming audio. I've mostly called baseball and softball, a little bit of basketball, and about one half of handegg.*

Assuming you know the sport well enough to call the action, ANYONE can do play-by-play for a short stint. If you have an analyst, a.k.a. color commentator, you can (and should) rely on your broadcast partner to get into the Xs and Os, so you don't even need to be an expert on strategy and tactics.

But even after an hour, it starts getting tough. In a sport where you have to fill in large spans of non-action (like baseball), you start running out of things to say. In a sport that has more consistent, steady play (like basketball), the action becomes repetitive, and you quickly run out of different ways to describe the same thing.

As mikelbyl noted, a live poker broadcast can go hours and hours longer than a sports broadcast. Absolutely a different animal. On top of that, the players are not as easily identifiable (e.g. no numbered uniforms). I also don't know what the visuals look like for those guys in the booth. For example, do they have one monitor that provides a close-up shot of the board cards?

Furthermore, are the stack sizes and hole cards shown on yet another monitor? Sure, we at home see all of this info on a chyron, but it's altogether possible this is presented in a rougher fashion when you're in the booth. Adam and Terrence, you might be able to shed some light on this operation.

I wholeheartedly agree about Tony Dunst, too. This is a person who knows the game at a high level AND now has experience calling live play-by-play (rather than color). But that's an extremely rare combo: even Mordecai Brown can call on one hand the number of people who boasts both skill sets.





*On a quick side note: one of my odd little bucket-list items is to call a sport like water polo or lacrosse, but in an old-timey style not unlike Red Barber or Lowell Thomas. Problem is, I don't think I could do it without laughing.

wp, sir, wp.

Not sure if you're aware of this, but Legionnaire's disease spreads almost exclusively via water lines. Basically it's a bacteria that really thrives at just below 60 degrees C in water and then spreads airborne.
(There was a big event about 10 years back here in Holland when many people got contaminated through a jacuzzi that was insufficiently heated at an exhibition and something like 10 people died. Definitely no fun and a sneaky disease.)

I work in a children's home and once a week we have to test the water temperature of EVERY single tap in the home with a thermometer and write it down. It's to stop legionnaires apparently. It's a right ball ache, reckon the Rio should start doing that ha

About the guy only getting ~40 seconds...

I'm working for the WSOP and we were instructed on the new "clock" rule for this year.

It goes as follows...

If someone calls clock, the floor will come over and ask us how long the player has been tanking. We tell them, and then based on what we tell them, it's at the floor's discretion to allot them 0-30 seconds until their hand is dead.

They also told us that this was designed to eliminate excessive tanking.

Guess I got a couple details wrong, according to the thread (it was post flop, No board given). The guy in the NVG thread claimed that the floorman was standing next to the table and immediately "called" the clock on another player, giving him a small amount of time. He was mad because

• no player called the clock, it was the floor trying to speed up a dealer change
• it is a tournament rule, and this was a cash game
• in his mind, 40 seconds was way to little time

Assume you're working both cash and tournaments, and management would be happy with rule applied in both places.

Hang on, hang on, hang on... how dare you speak ill of NVG, a forum containing such Socratic gems as:

[Yes, that's an actual post, more or less on topic, in Terrence's thread]

Terrence, you mentioned in said NVG thread and on this episode that creating a softer bubble – i.e. a min-cash payout that is a fraction of the buy-in – would require paying out a larger percentage of the field. Why? Why couldn't you continue paying the same percentage, yet still pay the min-cashes a smaller amount to disincentivize bubble stalling?

You also suggested that the pros would hate a flatter structure that pays a larger slice of the field. But if you keep the same payout percentage, yet take some of the prize pool from the bottom to the top, wouldn't the pros PREFER this?

Take the recent $2,500 NLHE event as an example. The bottom 10 finishers received $3,758. So the pay "jump" is zero to that. I can only assume it took forever to go from 166 players to 163, because that jump is substantial relative to the buy-in.

On the other hand, 153rd through 127th made $3,876. I'm guessing there wasn't a whole lot of stalling from 155 to 153, because the extra $118 is hardly worth the effort. These are points you've already spelled out very well in the OP of the NVG thread.

So why couldn't there be a structure where you still pay 15 percent of the field, but 163rd pays (say) $250? Maybe 162nd pays $270, 161st is worth $300, 160th gets you $350, etc. (That might be TOO gradual, haven't worked it out all the way up). Perhaps it's not until you reach 130th place – top 12 percent of the field – that you break even for your $2,500 entry.

As I mentioned in the other thread, I actually did sit down on Excel and attempted to work out an alternative prize structure. The problem is that I don't know the multipliers and factors from one increment to the next (other than 1st to 2nd always seems to be the 1.618 golden ratio). So I'm sure there was a bad jump in there somewhere.

Regardless, it certainly seems like it should be possible and reasonable to have a prize structure that a) does not pay 40 percent of the field, b) has a smaller min-cash to curb stalling, and c) still rewards the top 1 percent of the field to satisfy the pros and/or serious recs.

In your 2500 example, you wouldn't be paying 15% though, you'd be paying 12%.
Not getting your buyin back is not 'getting paid', it's losing.

On the discussion of a 'social change' needed to quit stalling.

It is a much smaller player pool, but peer pressure basically stopped the aggressive seat changing to get direct position on fish in the CAZ 20/40+ player pool. Sort of an unwritten rule you either stay put or have a seat(s) you prefer and you only move to get to a seat you always like better. There used to be people jumping all over each other to get an open seat and now the majority of the people moving are the losing players.

Can't speak for the spread limit games.

Terrence with a healthy stack right now in the 10k LHE event. Go TChan!!!!

I LOLd at this update on Pokernews:
Upon seeing Chan's hand, Hellmuth began berating Chan who calmly called the floorman and asked for Hellmuth to be given a warning. The floorman told Hellmuth not to direct any obscenities at Chan and play carried forward as Hellmuth continued to rant to himself.

(My comment: Hellmuth is such an assclown.)