May qualify as best plot twist in fewest words. Loved this.

Analyzing Pluribus

A few interesting followups to the debut of Pluribus, the first multiway pokerbot. The bot played a handful of pros in a six-max, no-rake format and "won" over a 10K sample. A good overview of the bot, the match, and AI's inevitable supremacy over puny humanity, is available here. The 10K hands were released by Noam Brown and Tuomas Sandholm, Pluribus's creators, and GTO nerds far and wide have begun analyzing them. A bunch of YouTube clips have been uploaded here, and breakdown of the bot's preflop strat is available here.

After watching a handful of the vids, two things jump out to me. First, the bot is cold-calling from the SB way more than I would expect. Second, it donks a bunch of turns for small sizing. And then, of course, there are a bunch of lines that make no sense to me. Human...all too human

Good seeing you and your fashionable Straddle hat

You married a wise woman!

Impressive font switch.

I thought you might be amused by this new song I just heard. It's about the Texas culture I grew up in but it also catches some of the old Louisiana spirit and also Florida in the TruthTeller thread that you turned me on to.

Jesse Dayton's "Daddy Was A Badass”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeJpA5oJQcc

The third stanza sounds just like the fantasies of my old running buddies.

Daddy made it out of the drilling rig patch
And gamblin' paid for his school
The University of Texas, sure got reckless
Livin' on eight-ball pool
He had backroom, all-night poker games
A pistol by a rotary phone
He was a hot-tip handicapper on football
Never took a student loan
So he passed with honors by sellin' numbers
To everybody in his class
Then he drove back home to old east Texas
(Well you know what he was!)

Well, maybe not the pistol part ...

love it.

What part of Texas are you from? East TX?

This is my favorite Texas song. Tuff to beat Houston!

I'm addicted to Texas blues/"outlaw country" music, and when I'm driving alone the XM outlaw country channel 60 is usually on (my wife, who's family is from East Texas, hates all country music.)

I've heard "Daddy was a badass" several times on XM and of course Waylon is a staple there as well.

It's hard to pick my favorite performer but judging by the number of CDs I've purchased I guess it would be either Townes Van Zandt (rip) or Ray Wylie Hubbard. Both of them penned pretty good poker themed songs -
Townes : "Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVHE5V49oA
Ray Wylie: "Mississippi Flush" . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I51SK3JIrNw

Hopefully those are good links but a you tube search will find the songs if not.

I moved to Houston when I was 11 (from Corpus) and started playing poker when I got to high school; I got (too) serious about the game when I got to Rice (where the engineers and the jocks both shared the passion). And as in the song lyrics, one of the players was in fact booking sports betting (and there were the inevitable problems). Too many weekends I'd drive to Austin to hang out with my best friend who was then at UT, and who was an expert at nine-ball but a semi-fish in the all-night poker games there. After three and half years of that I took a year off to get my academic act together (got married, which helped), changed schools, and changed my life (well, not entirely).

Two poker classics, indeed. But all of Townes is great. Have you listened to Steve Earle's tribute album? (Got to see Earle perform it -- a real treat -- in his release tour in Toronto a while back. Country music has a place in the great North as well as in the Southwest.)

I have the Steve Earle tribute (and most of his other records as well ) another favorite. I guess he and Townes were pretty close back in the day.

And I should give a nod to Corpus - that was the first place I ever got thrown in jail :-). We went there on our "senior trip" in high school. Bought some beer with fake ids, sitting on the beach and a cop came up and said "have you boys ever been in jail?" Some one said no, and he said "well you are going now". Just overnight of course.

story checks out

Have you seen Treme? Earle's in there, and he plays a lot of music.

I don't think I knew that you went to Rice. Good stuff. Beer Bike is one of the coolest university traditions that I know of.

Sadly, the school's quality has declined in recent years. I know a plethora of miscreants who somehow earned a degree there. They let pretty much anyone in these days.

I loved Treme. Only part of the show I didn't like was losing John Goodman from the cast - always wondered why he was cut out.

Games should be good Thursday and Friday at CLOL. I'll message you.

In my Sophomore year I was the anchor man on the beer-chugging part of the beer-bike team. I was good at opening my throat and letting it pour down! And to stay in shape, I spent the better part of that year in training.

Side note: I went online recently and discovered that my training site, Kay's Lounge, is still open, just north of the campus. As someone told me when I started school, Kay's might as well have had a sign up that said "Official Rice Pub." I was served there for the first time. (They never checked iIDs.)

I learned a lot that year, but none of it was on the curriculum.

Yeah Goodman was one of the highlights in S1 for sure. The show felt weaker as it went along, though I enjoyed it all the way through. Clear 2nd-tier show imo.

Hope you guys keep getting decent action a few days a week

I fear that Kay's is no more. I went a few times when I was around campus. I was just in Houston last week and didn't see Kay's where I remembered it. The Rice Village area has completely transformed, so not surprising if it is gone, but sad for sure (I just looked online and apparently it closed in 2016)

August Results, September Goals



All you can do is notice the bird
and feel for the bird and write
to tell me how language feels
impossibly useless

—Craig Arnold, "Bird Understander"

August Goals

[X] Read

In addition to the poem above, one of the things that jumped out to me this month is Jill Lepore's personal essay The Lingering of Loss.

[79] Write 100 hours
[15] Play xx hours

After leaving AZ and failing to play at Casino del LOL, I drove to one of my favorite places in the US, Ruidoso, New Mexico, where I had high hopes for a fun few seshes at Inn of the Mountain Gods. Alas, the room is dying. Surprised to see a once-bustling room reduced to a mere five tables, I sat in the lone 1/3 game on a Monday night at 8 and the game broke before ten. It's a good example of a room that can't sustain itself when tourism slows down.

I made up for a lack of pokering with ample hiking. I repeated one of my favorite hikes from a few years ago, Sierra Blanca, the highest peak in NM that sits on the Mescalero Indian Reservation. You have to trek through a ski lodge to make it to the top, and the trail is so poorly marked that "bushwacking," or trekking up the ski paths, is unavoidable. Here's an early part of the hike when the trail is still visible.


Up the ski path

Approaching the Summit

Poor Man's Knife Edge

At the Top!

I'm just getting back to Nola now, where I'll be spending the month settling back into town, teaching a short class, and playing a decent bit of poker before more travel in October.

September Goals

[ ] Read
[ ] Write 50 hours
[ ] Study 50 hours
[ ] Play xx hours

We need to work on your NM geography. I think Wheeler Peak in the Sangre de Cristo range is still the highest peak in the state. Unless Sierra Blanca has grown a lot higher very recently

Next time you visit Casino LOL we can do a tutorial on mountains of New Mexico.

Shame to hear the game in Ruidoso is dead - used to be some real decent action there, with a lot of tourists from Texas.

Thanks for the cerrection

I've actually climbed Wheeler Peak. It was years ago when I was 15 or 16, and I can remember being out of breath for the last mile or two. We would hike 20 yards, take a breather, hike 20 yards, take a breather...one of the few hikes where I've really felt the altitude.

To be fair I was there during the weekday, and the action was decent (they've raised the 1/3 cap to 500). But what really struck me was how radically they downsized. At five tables, the room is easily half the size of what it used to be

Sweet pics, looks like a fun hike.

I visited Inn of The Mountain God's with a buddy of mine around this time last year. My visit was on a Friday night and it seems like the poker room was only running 3 tables and were down to 1 by the time I walked, which was around 1 a.m.. Overall, the ambiance of that place and the area is amazing. We spent the following day hiking around Grindstone Lake. What a great experience. I'm pretty sure that I have some pics of my visit to the area somewhere in my thread.

Thanks so much for sharing this! I spent nearly my entire reading of this essay through teary eyes. What a moving read. As far as the line by the author "never show your colleagues your soft belly, ever" I found some resonance with my experience at the poker table. I feel as though my being a bearded young-ish man at the poker table that I am often at the brunt of more than my fair share of terse behavior, in spite of my trying to be a friendly presence. I digress. Thanks again for sharing such a lovely piece.

That's a far cry from my last Jill Lepore read, on King Phillip's War.

Poker Faces in the Crowd: Piyush and Simi Mittal

This month I interviewed Piyush and Simi Mittal, a poker-playing couple who lives in New Orleans. We discussed juggling poker with work, the appeal of tournaments versus cash games, and the marital metagame.

Grindstone Lake is beautiful and very ez to get to. And yes, the casino is lovely as well. Very appealing to anyone, and probably more so if you have the misfortune of living in West Texas
Part of the reason why I admire the piece is because it's so different from her other writing. I'm hard-pressed to think of another academic who writes about personal stuff so well.

These Truths will probably be the next history book that I read.

The Perils of Semi-Legal Poker

A mainstream take on Houston poker appeared today in the New Yorker. It's a bit heavy on legalese but, overall, as you'd expect, a good read. The author calls semi-legal poker club owners "regulatory entrepreneurs" who, like the owners of Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, and DraftKings, build companies around a plan to change or even break the law.

This is my favorite part (lol Houston)

Actually, my favorite part might be when the author smuggles in a bad beat story in which, after raising pre with JJ, she gets stacked by a raggedy two pair and goes on tilt. It's nice to see that, wherever the action is, some things don't change.

This ftw.

And LOL me thinking you hadn't seen it already ...

I got my finger on the throbbing pulse of Htown poker! Or something like that.

RIP Al Alvarez

Al Alvarez, one of the last survivors of the fifties literary scene and author of the GOAT poker book The Biggest Game in Town, has passed away. Here's his obituary.

And here's how fellow poker writer Jim McManus remembers him:

I love Alvarez's writing, of course, but I also admire his way of being in the world. He lived life on his own terms, it seems, which led to an incredibly rich and diverse literary output. He'll be missed.

RIP Ship It JJ

Jackpot Gwen sees everything from the other side of the table: JJ’s telling another joke when he cozies up to the guy beside him, like he’s going to whisper the punchline, and then he kind of slumps onto his neighbor’s shoulder. Everyone keeps laughing, thinking that maybe this is part of the joke, and it’s only when the guy nudges JJ so that he flops back onto his seat, mouth open, eyes rolly-polly, that something seems very wrong. Fester stops dealing and glances at Gwen and then back to JJ and wonders to himself, is this guy breathing? It doesn’t look like he’s breathing. He’s definitely not breathing.

JJ’s neighbor lifts him from behind by both shoulders, scattering white chips and JJ’s Heineken, and gently lowers him to the ground. Others leave their seats and look on with expressions of shock and fear and fascinated revulsion. Eight tables, seventy-two pairs of eyes staring alongside the dealers and waitresses and bartenders and railbirds, everyone’s attention fixed on one gray-haired gurgling gambler. Ketchup can only see the view from behind, but she can tell by the expressions on everyone’s faces that the situation is bad. It’s really bad. Jackpot Gwen keeps stroking his face and whispering, JJ, JJ, and Stephen is calling 911 and Captain Bob is asking who knows CPR, does anyone know CPR, how is it possible that there isn’t a single doctor or nurse in this place who knows CPR. Ketchup doesn’t know CPR. All she knows is that you don’t do mouth to mouth anymore and you do it to the beat of Ah ah ah ah, staying alive, staying alive.

It takes a long time for the casino medics to arrive. Way too long. At least ten minutes. Calling the two baby-faced Harrahdise employees “medics” is a stretch, because they seem to have no clue how to operate the oxygen tank and the defibrillator that they set beside the motionless body that’s resting on the shabby industrial carpet. They tear open his white shirt. JJ lays with outstretched arms and open palms, Christ-like, as the medic leans uncertainly over his chest. He seems better suited to be working the Lucky Dogs Stand behind him than saving lives.

Ridiculous, Fester says, spitting out the word.

You have a heart attack and no oxygen, Gwen says, and it’s going to kill your brain.

Ridiculous.

At Harrah’s poker room right now, Mitchell writes. Someone slumped over and couldn’t resuscitate. NOFD working on him right now. Hopefully they can bring him back.

Oh no!!, Smiley Campbell says.

Prayers, Wild Bill says.

Who? Miss Katie wants to know. That’s the question on everyone’s mind. Who? Who?

Ship It JJ, Mitchell tells Katie. You know him. The old Indian guy who yells, every time he wins a pot, “Ship it!” As in, send those chips, pass the sugar, show me the money. Ship It JJ, who gleefully howled so loudly that players five tables away turned in annoyance or amusement, wondering how anyone in the White Chip Game could get so animated over a measly fifty dollar pot. The White Chip Game: a soul-crushing rake trap filled with piles of filthy 1$ discs and the most hopeless players imaginable. The cardroom equivalent of the slums.

I don’t like to joke about these things, Nick says. But can you imagine dropping dead in the White Chip Game?

It takes almost an hour to get JJ out of the room. When I watched them take him out on the gurney, Mitchell writes, I think everyone knew that he was gone. The NOFD worked on him for half an hour. It looked like he wasn’t responsive. I think they tried all that they could do.

It's the craziest thing that Ketchup has ever seen in a poker room. Full EMT team, CPR, cut the shirt off him, did the bring-back-to-life shock. A few people at her table start hugging, appreciating life. Some people kept on playing but they were further from the action. It’s crazy to her that everyone has gone about their business after someone may or may not have died one hour earlier.

That’s because poker players are generally selfish pieces of ****, Fester says. He realizes that calling poker players selfish is like calling politicians corrupt, or calling celebrities vain. The description is so obvious that it’s barely worth mentioning. But sometimes he can’t stomach this place or these people, these callous solipsistic ****ers who surely deserve every calamity that might afflict them, whether from fire or flood or a generous mugging. Sitting idly by while a man clings to life mere feet away. Ridiculous.

What’s ridiculous, to Nick, is that gamblers shouldn’t be expected to gamble. His own table had stopped playing—out of respect or entertainment or confusion, it’s hard to tell why—but three other tables on the room’s fringes kept betting and folding and raising, rapt and unperturbed. What else are they supposed to do? Get busy living, or get busy dying. Twenty years ago, at the MGM in Las Vegas, the exact same thing happened: some weak-hearted adrenaline junkie froze up, Nick watched him hit the floor, EMS showed up. And the whole room kept playing, every single table. Ten years before that, in 1988, a legend of the game, Jack “Treetop” Straus, suffered a fatal heart attack while playing poker at the Bike in LA. Folks said the same thing about Strauss that people are saying about JJ now: at least he died doing what he loved.

With JJ gone, the cardroom settles back into precarious harmony. A newcomer arrives at Nick’s table, unracks three stacks of red chips, settles into his seat, and everyone eyes him sympathetically, as if to say, Boy, did you miss a show. What? What happened? he asks. And just like that, the conditions are perfect for the only two things that matter, in this place: the playing and the talking. "It was terrible," Nick says casually, chip-shuffling and speaking with the authority of an eyewitness. "JJ was telling a joke and everybody thought that he was laughing, but he had a brain aneurysm, or a heart attack, or a massive stroke, and it took Harrah’s entirely too long to get a paramedic. They tried to resuscitate him for about a half an hour, but it was no good. Nobody knows whether he died or he lived, but I think it’s unlikely that he lived."