Michael Craig's Journal

I spent an inordinant amount of time playing tournaments yesterday on Full Tilt. I was in fine shape in the $500,000 Guarantee tournament - satellited in at the last minute, survived getting no cards for 1 1/2 hours, worked my way up to 3d in chips with 400 of the original 1,400 left - and got worked over by the system, bad. In that tournament and about a zillion that followed, I took a bunch of notes, not all (thank goodness!) on my tournament play.

1. Everyone can tell you about their bad beat stories, especially online. I can tell you how I had Ad-8d and got all my chips in the middle against Ah-6h after a flop of As-8c-Kh and lost to running hearts. But I’m pretty sheepish about yakking up how my A-9 beat A-K after an A-A-T flop. (The money all went in and I hit a 9 on the river.)

I play a style that, especially early in a tournament or when I have a lot of chips, promotes getting in with the worst hand. When I’m calling a raise with 7-7 early in a deep-stack tournament, I WANT my opponent to have A-A. That’s how I get the implied odds to win a huge stack. And I am usually not going to lose more than my call of the raise.

So I try not to moan and groan about my bad beats, and I encourage others to do the same. It is part of the human condition to complain about bad luck and bad breaks, but very, very few of the top pros fixate on those losses.

Never complain, never explain.

2. Mike Matusow springs to mind as an exception, a top player who whines about his bad luck and bad breaks. Even though I’ve seen him - in the privacy of his house, not for TV-promoting theatrics - almost in tears over bad beats and bad luck, he is usually very composed in the big moments where it’s gone wrong.

I know he puts on a show for TV sometimes, especially if he’s up against one of his foils. And I know he collapsed after busting out of the 2004 Main Event. (There were extenuating circumstances there.) But I’ve called him a couple times right after he has busted out of tournaments and he’s been very cool, analytical in the way you would expect of a pro.

While I was playing and cursing at my luck, I was watching CardPlayer.com for his progress in the Brunson WPT event at the Bellagio. He had gotten to the last 50 out of more than 500 starters and had 600,000 in chips at one time, more than double the average. But his stack dwindled and he lost a pre-flop all-in with T-T against A-A.

“To the day I die, I thought I had a read on that guy. I don’t have any regrets about that hand. But I was down to 240,000. I think I didn’t play aggressive enough when I had 600,000. That’s what I’m thinking about now. I gotta play more live poker.”

3. I talked with Andy Bloch late in the evening and he asked me if I looked at Bill Chen’s and Jerrod Ankenman’s THE MATHEMATICS OF POKER. I will give you a transcript of the conversation, but first, a little context.

I’ve been hearing about this book for a long time and had it on pre-order for months with Amazon.com. Andy Bloch and Chris Ferguson had both referred to it during interviews for the Full Tilt Tournament book we produced together with the other Full Tilt pros.

I was told it was very technical. Occasionally, when Andy or Chris would describe a concept that I had trouble grasping or thought their explanation was too difficult for advanced players to understand, they might say something like, “Maybe we don’t need to cover it. Chen and Ankenman go through that.”

I started reading it and I have two reactions:

(A) It is phenomenal, encouraging players to look at poker the way it should be looked at, arriving at conclusions that may seem counterintuitive but should be the core of how you evaluate each decision in a poker hand. 

(B) It is the most complex book I have ever wanted to understand. Most pages consist more of tables, graphs, and formulas than text. I don’t even know how to type that kind of manuscript, or I’d give you an example. Some of it can be skipped or sufficiently understood from the surrounding material - the authors even encourage that in the introduction unless you are sufficiently mathematically inclined - but it is so … intimidating. It is an extremely difficult book to fully understand, but it is absolutely worth it. Even if you mostly fail, you will benefit. Keep in mind that I’ve spent a year learning the mysteries of poker from Chris Ferguson, Andy Bloch, Richard Brodie, and Howard Lederer. That background convinces me of the importance of this stuff, but even that didn’t prepare me to breeze through it.

ANDY: Have you read THE MATHEMATICS OF POKER.

MIKE: I started. It’s difficult material for me to digest.

ANDY: You should have seen the earlier drafts.

4. I’ve been reading some very good books. I tend to focus on books featuring the kind of writing I strive for. Sometimes, that means a particular subject or narrative style. Sometimes, it’s just about enjoying the writing. Here is some of what I’m reading, or have read in the last week, other than Math/Poker:

Stanley Booth, THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF THE ROLLING STONES

Isaiah Wilner, THE MAN TIME FORGOT

Richard Ben Cramer, WHAT IT TAKES

Homer, THE ODYSSEY (Robert Fagles translation)

George Plimpton, OPEN NET

Truman Capote, IN COLD BLOOD

Every one of these books is a gold mine and a pleasure. I have never read THE ODYSSEY from start to finish, and Fagles’s transation is great. This sounds cliche but “here’s where it all started.” When I finish, I’m going to read his transations of THE ILIAD as well as THE ANEID.

I got motivated to read ODYSSEY from THE MAN TIME FORGOT. Henry Luce gets the sole credit for creating TIME MAGAZINE. Luce was partners with Briton Haddon, a brilliant, erratic, larger-than-life character who deserved half the credit, if not more. Haddon died before the age of 30, just as the magazine was taking off, and his contributions were erased by the magazine’s corporate history for decades. Haddon developed a writing and editing style, which became part of the magazine’s style, from the way Homer did things, like his use of adjective phrases.

George Plimpton is one of my favorite writers of all time. I know that his participatory journalism was just a small part of his legacy, but what a joy he is to read! Great at incorporating background and history into his adventures. Great at being the hapless “professional amateur.” Tremendous deadpan sense of humor. I don’t know how I never got around to reading about his attempt to play goalie for the Boston Bruins, but it is a wonderful book. 

My favorite part: after he plays goalie for five minutes in an exhibition game, he retires (in uniform, minus pads) to a bar under the arena to talk about it with SPORTS ILLUSTRATED execs. He returns to the locker room surprised to see half the team because the game is still going. He missed one of the biggest brawls in the history of hockey. Plimpton had written at length about fighting as part of hockey and the strange rituals connected with it. His immediate response was, “Why didn’t you come and get me?” That was followed by the hiliarious reactions of the other players, who were mostly holding ice packs to bruises, and Plimpton’s imaginary narration of how THAT would play out.

I read half of Stanley Booth’s book about ten years ago. It was water-damaged several years back and I kept carrying it around, meaning to finish it. It’s about the strangeness of life among the Rolling Stones during the winter of Altamont. It’s a great, freaky account that emphasizes how being around extraordinary people can lead to extraordinary journalism - not just because telling about their lives makes great reading (though it does) but because it can encourage a writer to raise the bar. If you hang around with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, you don’t want to describe the experience in an ordinary or conventional way.

Cramer’s WHAT IT TAKES is a 1000-page book about the men behind the 1988 run for the Presidency. The depth of his research and the way he unwinds the lives of Bob Dole, Joe Biden, Richard Gephardt, etc. - going back decades, even generations - is remarkable.

I’m cheating a little with IN COLD BLOOD. Not only have I read it before, but I’m listening to it on my iPod on long drives. Mind you, it’s creepy hearing the story of a slaughter of a family on the plains when you are driving in the middle of the night between Kingman and Wickenburg, 131 miles with just one gas station in between. But it’s one of the best books ever written, and one of the best books for a writer to read.

5. Chris Ferguson’s experiment is rolling along. In early 2006, he tried repeating his feat of a few years ago, in which he turned $2 into $20,000 in online poker. For most of the year, I’ve seen him haunting late-night freerolls. I’ve given a couple updates in this Journal where his totals were between $5 and $7. But he has never lost heart or patience. We talked for a long time last night and he told me that he’s up to $189. His bankroll grew sufficiently to play $5 sit-n-gos and he’s been doing very well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 3:35 am and is filed under Categorized.