Our last time out, at about 2 in the morning and wasted, we all decided it was a great idea to hit the casino. Nothing good happens at that point, and I knew when I opened my wallet that it was a bad idea. The details are a bit hazy from the booze, I walked away with over half a grand, in about 10 minutes of work, during which 0 and 00 hit several times (and we bet on them). Apparently we were making $100 bets at a time. That's a lot for me. I don't want to jinx it so I'm not going back to roulette. I normally stick to nickel and penny slots. Cheap entertainment and it lasts a long time. My favorite "win" of all time came when I won a few bucks on a penny machine, gave it to my wife while I went and got a drink, and she proceeded to win $340 off a 1 cent bet with my money. I know, I'm a cheap ass.
I've had a couple of PM's about poker, so I'll throw this out there - I have just about every fundamental poker strategy book in ebook form, if anyone wants a particular book or the whole set shoot me a pm. Also, for all that Phil Gordon is a talentless hack, fuck if he doesn't write really simple, easy to understand guides over at ESPN.
I come from a long line of gamblers who didn't know when to walk away. My perceptions are probably biased, because I remember my cousins getting insane gifts, and then having those insane gifts taken away two days later to pay for the next hand. I remember the massive vacations (to a casino resort), and the week after where they couldn't afford petrol to come to dinner at our house. But my views have largely held up among my experiences with friends and customers who were addicts as an adult. The perception that you play better after winning has always been incredibly common among those addicts. And it's simple conditioning. If you're doing subject conditioning to instill a behaviour, you smack them when something undesirable happens (or whatever, inflict a negative consequence, lead them to associate the undesirable act with bad things. Then when something good happens, you give them a biscuit (or whatever). Eventually, they associate the undesirable thing with the smack, and the desirable behavior with the biscuit. Losing your rent money is in the case of 'I'm losing, therefore I'm playing badly' the smack on the nose. Winning is the 'I'm winning, therefore I'm playing well' reward biscuit. We all respond to conditioning on some level - it's just how we work. Winning while gambling triggers an endorphin high. Your dopamine levels spike. Your oxytocin and serotonin saturation peaks. The chemical reaction in your brain and in your blood looks a lot like an orgasm. You get high. You get intoxicated. And your decision making capability is impaired or reduced. The severity of those things depends on the gambler. And I know I'm a bad gambler - because I get that high, and I make shit decisions. Good gamblers tolerate that high better, like a good drunk might be less dangerous to drive. But part of the intoxication is making you think you're making better decisions than you are. Making you feel like you're better equipped to handle it. My observation of regular gamblers is that the rarest skill or quality of a gambler, is how well they make decisions when they're winning. Luck is a universal constant, no matter what any gambler things. And doing the math to play well, or learning to read the table and your opponents is something that most people can learn if they want to. But I think the ability to make good decisions when you're winning is genetic fluke - and is what separates the WSOP champions from a lot of homeless people.
I agree with everything you've written, but I think there is an important caveat - at the poker table, all of your opponents see your reward biscuits, or rolled up newspaper to the nose, as well. It is a hell of a lot easier to win once you are already winning. Your opponents see that you're winning and assume you are making great plays and catching cards. You might make some bad decisions (hey, I'm the big stack, any 2 suited cards are good to play right?), but your opponents also do - they stop trying to bluff against you, and stop calling your bluffs. The converse is also true - I've lost many hands I should have won because I was down and people used my own losing streak to crush me.
There are clear exceptions, and I don't gamble enough, or have enough first hand insight into the anecdotes at hand to say one way or another what happened. But I know that very common cognitive distortions would explain a lot of what's happening. You Are Not So Smart contains great wisdom - When Jessica Alba is bouncing on your dick, you have a pretty good chance of knowing why your emotional state is what it is. With anything less clear than that, chances are good that you'll latch desperately onto any explanation that reconciles with your ego, and cling to it desperately. And tend to reject facts that contradict your first feelings.
That's an interesting article - I've run across that bias before, maybe in Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational or its sequel? While it certainly has an effect, I'm not totally convinced that it is the major cause of what is going on when someone hits a huge winning, or losing, streak at the poker table. Part of this is the fact that poker has some clearly defined percentages. I know my odds of hitting that flush card on the turn, or the gods spreading cheeks and putting cock in ass when someone turns their two pair into a boat. I may have been watching too much Spartacus lately. Ahem. However, there is an awfullotof literature on the phenomenon of 'running bad'. Essentially, it boils down to incentivizing others to play well against you. And
it has less to do with how chemicals in your brain and more to do with how the other players perceive you. If you've shown down very strong hands and been winning, then you can take away pots easily without showdown in the future. If you've been caught bluffing then more bluffing won't work -- until you showdown a strong hand. That's generally how things work. As far as all those chemicals affecting your play-- my explanation is that experience easily levels this out to manageable levels. Poker isn't exciting unless you're playing above your usual stakes. Online pros can play from 30k -- 200k hands per month. Do you really think they get all worked up after winning a buy-in? Also I think you might be confusing "gamblers" with professional poker players. Poker is not gambling. Poker is considered gaming because you are a participant and can affect the outcome directly. With any pit game the element of luck is just sick and you have no control in the outcome. Any sort of deviance in the amount you bet according to the amount you're winning or losing makes no logical sense. In Roulette you can put money on 00 but it's the same chance every time. When you are winning in poker the game changes because the other players think of you differently and you can use that table image to win money ( or at least make +EV decisions against them).
I love gambling, I always have, always will. Starting when I was in college, I played alot of poker, online and a bit live. I had a tendency to get extremely pissed about wonky flops and horrible river fishing and would just start throwing chips around. I started playing tournaments but after awhile I burned out cause the returns weren't great for time invested so I would play cash games on the side and end up taking out bad beat frustrations there and it wasn't good. Bottom line, I was an above average player with poor bankroll management. When I was live I was much more dialed in and ended up playing much more effectively. Never played at casinos though because the Indian casino near my house only had Limit which was excruciating with some of the people who played and by the time I started going to Vegas, I was onto other things. Blackjack was my game for awhile, and its still one of my favorites to play if I'm with a couple of people. I have a pretty decent progressive strategy and have done decent for myself. I would say I'm probably about even. Well, in Vegas at least. On the two cruises I've been on, I'm probably down about 500-600. Fuck those auto dealers. I'm really big on the vibe of a table, if its bad, I get the hell out of dodge. I never understood the people who can sit at the same tables for hours unless they are consistently crushing it. I played single hand at O'Sheas for about 4 hours, never betting more than $40 a hand and walked away up over $800 one night. That was the hottest I've ever been and probably the only time I've sat at a blackjack table that long. Recently someone basically showed the statistics of a bad player at your blackjack table really not effecting you in the long run. Thats fine, but I still think it fucks with the karma of the game as ridiculous as that sounds. I was at a table playing 6 deck in Vegas back in June. It was myself, my roommate, and a couple from NC. We are all playing well, winning, having a great time when an older Hispanic gentleman sits down. He proceeds to begin playing like a complete jackass. Splitting 6s against a Q, staying on 13 against a face card. Hitting on 14 against a 6. You name it. And we began getting SLAUGHTERED. The woman honestly lost about 80% of her substantial stack in about 15 min. It was insane. And I've seen it happen many times. I know you only remember the bad supposedly, but looking back on that trip on the flight home, I couldn't think of a time when someone was playing like a douche and the table was still succeeding. My real game of choice is definitely craps. All my best stories revolve around craps from the insanely hot table I learned on during a cruise in which I won $450 not knowing what I was doing to the roll I had back in June in which two Asian men won so much they each gave me $50 as a thank you. There is no more fun social game, there is a ton of action, you can win in bunches, and if you play right, you have pretty damn good odds nobody can mess up with their dumb play. The only issue is you either have to be super patient at the start or your initial investment is kind of high and can disappear quick. This past trip, thanks to some rough blackjack and craps at the Aria and Paris, I was down a couple hundred bucks for the trip. My roommate and I made our way over to Harrahs and played some craps. The table was decent but nothing more than a point or so per roll. Then the dice came to me. I rolled for close to 30 min, hit 6 points and countless money numbers for others. My arm was getting tired. I ended up back in the black. The next night, we got beat up a bit at bad blackjack tables at the Bellagio and headed back to Harrahs. I again heated up on both of my rolls. So much that most of the table was voting to pass the dice back around to me and a drunken skirmish broke out between a redneck in Dale Jr sleeveless shirt and well dressed man who was part of the crew rooting for me to roll again. Only in Vegas. I ended up making close to $500 during that session, betting modestly, and left with $600 in my wallet, after arriving with $250, not including cash I had spent during the week in which I never went to an ATM and never used my CC. Really the only way, in my opinion, to maximize your profits is to take money off the table during and after hot streaks, otherwise you just give it back. If I get up a decent amount, say $150 on top of an original $100 stake at a blackjack table, I'll usually take my original buy in, a chunk of profits and move it aside, pretend it never existed. If I can do that, I allow myself to play dumb or reckless and still maintain some profit.
Couple things about leaving after a big hand: When I say you should continue to play out of politeness, that could just be a round, if that. It's just poor etiquette not to; like all etiquette based interactions, you can ignore it, just know that it puts you in obvious violation of unwritten rules. As for the actual gameplay, what I think you're missing (and what a lot of people miss) is that the game plays ENTIRELY DIFFERENTLY when you're deepstacked vs. when you're shallow. If you're playing 1-2, you should NOT be playing the same ranges when you have $80 vs. when you have $800. The edge of a good player is greatly magnified when stacks are deep, so you should continue playing IF you think you have a decent edge. On the flip side, if you're not actually that good, or if you're not good playing deep, you have the potential for huge mistakes. And you should quit until you can re-buy more shallow (usually 30-60 minutes). Saying you should leave when you're up is leaving tons of equity on the table and actually increases your variance (keep in mind that this is true for decent players who are playing a mainly logic-based game). If you have 400 BB, and you know that your silly opponents are going to play top pair like it's the nuts for their 100BB, you can easily pick them off AND absorb any losses when you get unlucky. Furthermore, you can play theoretically optimal poker, which you really can't do shallow. Having more money in play greatly magnifies the edge you have over worse players -- and if you're playing 1-2 in a casino, there will be worse players. You'd be surprised how many WSOP champions are degenerate gamblers, broke, or both. I agree that emotional control is rare for a gambler -- the vast majority of top tier players have expensive pit habits -- it's just often separated in poker.
For those of you playing real money online poker, what sites do you use now? It seems the FBI wasn't enjoying playing on Full Tilt and PokerStars as much as I was.
Bodog, Everleaf and Cake are about the only options for *new* US players now. Americans can still play on Merge but they've stopped taking new US accounts. I haven't played any of these sites, so I can't give you any suggestions on which are better than others. I play on PokerStars.
Nothing can ruin a relaxed, low-stakes round of Poker with friends, beer and good music more than the person who plays more than everyone else and takes it too far seriously. I'm all for a bit of banter, but having someone sit there for a few minutes whilst trying to determine (out loud) whether or not I'm bluffing or if I have the flush draw or whatever is annoying. Put your $20-$30 on the table to start with, crack open a cold beer, and have some fun. It's simple. Leave that other shit at weekly poker at the casino or online.
I gamble very rarely. I'll always play a little roulette if I'm in a casino since I find it fun and I seem to have great luck on it, but I'm not much for betting and I actually don't know the entire rules to Texas Hold 'em if you can believe that. This is one vice I try to keep at arms length, because it has the potential to ruin your life quicker than any other. One of my friends gambles on sports a LOT. The problem is the prick is good at it, and usually is up an average of $250 on any given weekend usually by betting on UFC fights and football. On his factory shift, guys on his line will bet $50 on a heads/tails coin flip. Yeesh.
I'm going to resurrect this thread to say, I took my first trip to Atlantic City last weekend and I loved it. What I didn't love was not knowing how to play any of the skill-based games well, and thus blowing my money on roulette instead of something more skillful. If anyone has advice on games that are: Low on house advantage More skill than pure chance Preferably dice-based (me and cards don't get along) please shoot me a PM or post in the thread, I guess. Craps looks promising, but I'm not sure how much of it is skill, and how much the house factors into things.
Poker is the only game I'm aware of that fits your criteria. The house takes a rake regardless of who wins, so the game isn't biased against you. It's also vastly more about skill than luck. Everything else, well, you pays your money and you takes your chances.
While the house doesnt have odds against you, the ten other people sitting at the table all vying for the same pot make your odds of winning extremely low. People seem to forget that.
Ugh, not really. First, there are only either 8 or 9 people sitting at the table with you. This actually makes a fairly big difference. Secondly, you're not often vying for the same pots: you get to choose which hands you play, and how you play them. The majority of people who go to casinos are going to have fun, so you definitely have an edge if you have even the barest faculty with statistics. An elite player playing at like, $1-2 would probably win 95% of the times s/he played. A good player can get to like 75%+, and even a decent-ish player could easily win 60% of sessions. With any natural inclination and a good bit of patience (the latter is much harder, imo), beating the rake is ridiculously easy. Of course, you might be beating it for like $2/hr., but that's much better than any other game.
Poker is the only game in the casino that is actually skill-based. Every other game is played by adhering to an algorithm. The three games that have the lowest "house" advantage are blackjack, video poker, and craps (only if you take the good bets, you might as well throw money at the casino if you're taking side bets). All of these, you can write a "program" for yourself to follow. There's an optimal way to play, and any sort of individuality is harmful to your bottom line. At a good casino, (think Foxwoods, not Reno. What's that? I can only double down on 10 and 11? Fuck you) playing with a good basic strategy, you will come out ahead about 30-35% of the time. It's unlikely that you'll lose everything, but your distribution of results is going to obviously be canted to the left because your expected return per game is around 97-98% of your input. With poker, your expected return is dependent on your skill. You won't win every time, but you'll win more than you lose. Of course, even the best player can get bad luck and lose big against a retard. The big thing to remember is that even with poker, there is a correct way and an incorrect way to play. The correct way to play is to look at your hand and evaluate what the probability is that a hand was generated that will beat yours. Playing Hold'em, this is a pretty simple task; there's only 2 * (13^2) - 13 = 156 different hands (Multiply by 2 for "Common suit" vs "different suit," subtract 13 for having a pair, as those by definition aren't common suits). You make a judgment on whether your hand is good or garbage; I prefer to see the flop unless I have complete garbage and some dude just threw a shitload of money on the table. Then you see the flop; you now have a distribution of value for hands. Some hands are going to be very high up on the distribution, (for example, if the first three cards are 2, 2, 3, and you have pocket 2's, then your hand is really fucking high) others are fucking low (for example, 7 and 9, different suit, is garbage with the flop I just made up) You then look at where your hand falls on the distribution and act accordingly. You can discard a bunch of those hands, (you only have to worry about common suit if there's the possibility of a flush) so your job is even easier. With practice, the calculations become instinctive. The best way to do it is to deal yourself a hand, then deal the river and write out on a piece of paper where your hand falls on the distribution. How many hands will beat your hand? How many will lose to your hand? If you have a good understanding of what this means, then the psychology aspect becomes a lot easier. "My hand beats 95% of possible hands, but this dude is raising me. Chances are, I'm going to beat him. So I'll raise him." After several dozen times of playing with this, start trying to see if you can do it in your head. You don't need to be exact; having a general idea is good enough at the start. As more cards start getting flipped, it becomes more important. The incorrect (drunk) way to play is to look at your hand and say "Yeah, it's good enough."