This is the first half of the patri-l email I sent about my first poker tournament:
To: patri-l
From: patri@izzy.com (Patri Friedman)
Subject: poker adventures
Date: November, 1998
Anyway, as some of you may know, I have recently become obsessed
with the
game of Poker. I've been playing low-limit holdem for about 3
weeks, and
reading books and the poker newsgroup. I love it!
Now for this story to be meaningful, you have to know what
"low-limit" and
"holdem" are. Don't wory, it'll get fun after the terminology.
There
will be lots of explanations first, so if you care at all about
poker, you
should read them. If not, skimming is ok, but this will be a whole
fun
adventure story, and I think its worth reading the background.
This will
be long, because I don't think most of you have had much experience
with
the poker world, and I think the background and descriptions are
pretty
interesting if you haven't heard them, so I'm going to try to
give lots of
flavor to the story.
In poker, there are several betting rounds. During each round,
you can
either fold, call whatever bet is currently on the table (meaning
put out
however much money is necessary, and get to stay in the hand),
or raise
the bet so that anyone who wants to stay in has to pay more. In
"Limit"
poker, the bets and raises must be a certain specified amount.
For
example, I play 3-6. That means that during the first two betting
rounds,
you can either fold, call, or raise by 3$. No more, no less. And
its 6$
in the later rounds. This means that your liability is limited
- someone
with a really strong hand can only raise you once if you bet with
a medium
strength hand. Its only if there are several people with strong
hands
that the betting gets high.
Thats what most normal poker in casinos is: "limit".
But the big
tournaments are what is called "no-limit". That means
that you can bet or
raise ANY amount of chips, up to what you have in front of you.
So on any
hand at any moment, you could be forced to put the entire game
on the
line, having to leave if you lose, but doubling or tripling up
if you win.
This is exciting. This is adrenalin. This is how they play the
world
championships. This is the king of poker games.
Now some of you might be thinking "Wait, but what if someone
has more
money than you? Can't they just raise more than you have and force
you
out?" Well, no, that would be dumb. The way it works is,
if you don't
have as much money as the bet, you go "all-in". You
push in all your
chips, and you are eligible for whatever portion of other peoples
bets you
can afford to match. So if there is 100$ of antes in the pot,
and I have
400$, and someone bets $1000, I can go "all-in" for
400$, and I can win
the antes and 400$ of my opponents money. If there is another
opponent
who calls the $1000, I can now win the antes and 800$ of their
money, and
they are playing against each other for the other 1200$ that they've
put
in.
Now the other important point is "what is holdem?".
Holdem is a poker
variation, very popular in the past few decades, in which each
player has
2 cards face-down, and there are 5 "community cards"
face up in the middle
that everyone uses. You make your best 5-card poker hand out of
those 7
cards. This is the kind of poker they played in "Rounders",
the movie
that inspired me. Because your opponent only has 2 cards that
you can't
see, it is possible, if you are very good, to figure out exactly
what they
are. Well, not in no-limit, but it is in limit, for reasons that
will be
explained later. In holdem there is a betting round when everyone
gets
their cards, then they put out the first 3 community card ("the
flop"),
there is betting, then the 4th card ("the turn"), then
betting, then the
5th ("the river"), and a final round of betting.
So in limit holdem, I would only have to pay 3$ or 6$ to see
the flop. If
I have a hand that can become very big with the right cards (a
possible
flush or straight), then it is often, if enough people are in
the pot,
worth paying to see the flop, even if I have a hand that is very
poor
beforehand. If the flop doesn't get me most of the way to a flush
or
straight, I can just fold, but if it does, I can stay in and maybe
make a
very big hand. Well, no limit isn't like that at all. The vast
majority
of the betting happens before the flop, because people can bet
huge
amounts. So you have one person betting say, $2000 (when a person
with
few chips has $8000 and someone with a lot has $40K or 60K), and
then
someone with $8000 goes all in, and everyone else folds, and the
person
who put $2000 out there has to either risk losing $6000 more (figuring
their opponent will only go all in with a very strong hand), or
fold and
give the other person their $2000. And all this happens without
any of
the community cards coming out. The community cards are almost
just an
arbitrary method that establishes the probabilities of different
starting
hands beating each other. So you don't do the figuring out of
what
the opponent has based on seeing the community cards and how they
bet like
you do in limit.
In limit, you have straights and flushes and royal houses and
all that
junk, because people can stay in with weak hands hoping to hit
them. In
no limit, its all about a guy with an ace and a king against a
guy with
two queens. If an ace or king appears in the community cards (without
another queen), the first guy has a higher pair and wins. If no
ace or
king hits, the second guy has a pair of queens and wins. Having
2 aces is
the best hand, because you don't need any cards to hit to win,
you just
need your opponent to not get really lucky (like having 2 queens
and
having a third hit). 2 kings is a good hand because it basically
only
loses when one of your opponents has an ace and an ace hits (or
he has 2
aces).
The way a tournament works is that everyone starts with a certain
number
of chips, and you play for a long time. When you are out of chips,
you
leave. They have antes that steadily increase, so you can't just
sit
tight and wait for great cards. If you aren't winning fast enough,
you'll
be ante'd out of the game. The prize pool is determined by how
much money
goes in (how many people play), and a certain number of finishing
places
are "in the money". The top 3 or 4 finishers usually
earn 50-80% of the
prize money, even when 15-25 people are getting paid. Finishing
in the
money but out of the top few generally doesn't earn you that much
compared
to the total prize pool, but at least you get more than your entrance
fee
back, and there is a prestige factor too.
The biggest set of tournaments is the WSOP, World Series Of
Poker, played
every summer at Binion's Horseshoe in vegas. The events are like
2K (or
5K?) up to 10K to enter. They have limit, no limit, holdem, seven
card
stud, and other poker variants. The championship event is the
10K
no-limit holdem tournament.
Oh yeah, even though slots and stuff are only legal in nevada,
AC, and
indian reservations, games like poker are legal in lots of places
(~25
states) because they are games of skill where the players play
against
each other, and the house just charges a time fee. California
has legal
poker and a huge poker scene.
Last Modified: The Closing Days of the Millenium
Patri Friedman / patri@izzy.com