Another day ...

Its now 3.5/6 in the Zonal.
Managed to play a decent endgame against Fijian Calvin Prasad, slowly converting advantages from a pawn in the middlegame to an exchange in the ending, to eventually achieving an overwhelming position with his knight almost trapped & my king and rook ready to either checkmate, or mop up his remaining pawns.
However in the afternoon I played my worst game of the tournament against IM Mirko Rujevic. This was a game that I never really got into. I misplayed the opening & wasted moves in a position where I couldnt afford to & decided that my only chance to make a game of it was to sacrifice a piece for some activity. Ultimately I made Mirko sweat a little, but it wasn't good enough. 3.5 is still a reasonable score, though obviously 4 would be better & 4.5 would have me half a point off the lead.
Today I play Tristan Stevens, who is a very dangerous player. He seems very tactical and aggressive, so I'm not exactly sure if I should go head on into a tactical battle, or try for something a little more quiet. I'll have a think about it & see how things go.
Poker has also been going reasonably well on this trip, with 2 decent winning sessions & 1 small losing session at the *huge* Jupiters poker pit (6 tables total, with weekdays mostly only having 2 tables up & running). I might try to get to Treasury in Brisbane at some stage, but that will require me to finish a game early ... which means either a crushing win, or a horrendous loss ... Ill see if I can make the former happen!

Two out of three ain't bad

And 2.5 out of 4 is OK too. I've had four winning (or at least a decent advantage) positions, but have only converted against lower rated opponents. I drew today with FM Endre Ambrus & lost to IM Gary Lane yesterday when I missed a tactic. Will see how things go in the remaining 5 rounds.

Holidays ... sort of

Reports are now finished for another semester, so my life has returned to something akin to normal. Anyway, long story short ... I've taken leave for the last week of the school term to play in the Oceania Zonal Chess Championships on the Gold Coast.
This involves an early morning plane trip (the wonders of cheap flights) & 9 games of chess starting at noon on Saturday. I may have an opportunity to blog from the tournament, though with the fees for internet connections in the room being ridiculous (I think I saw something which was roughly $25/day), then I might have to look for alternatives. Perhaps I'll try and grab a few minutes on the Closet Grandmaster's laptop. He's apparently doing a live blog from the tournament that you can follow here.
If you're interested in my progress, keep an eye on the Oceania Zonal website. As the 27th seed in a field of 73, I'm not exactly a favourite to win the event (or finish near the top), but I'm still hoping for a reasonable result ... and better form than the Doeberl Cup/SIO Easter effort!
There might even be a surprise or two in store for people ... but I'll see what develops.

That time of year

Yes, its the time of year all teachers dread ... or maybe its just teachers at the school I teach at ... REPORT WRITING TIME! Not that writing reports in itself is a horrible experience, its just that it is a very time-consuming one.
Of course I've drawn the really short straw with teaching Humanities - not only do I have more subjects to teach (and therefore work to mark & reports to write), but I also get the type of work that is more time-consuming to mark. The school has the wonderful idea to make all electives (ie: everything I teach except 9/10 English) 2-hour per week subjects ... so I have 8 classes in total to teach, report on, etc. Add to that the nature of the work, which is typically more essay/project based & I wonder why I didn't decide to get into maths teaching, where for the most part it is simply a case of putting together an answer sheet & comparing what the students have done to what the correct answers are.
Of course this is further complicated by the fact that I'm probably better at maths/science stuff than I am at English & it leaves me very frustrated. Heck, my year 9 Modern World class basically became a science class involving balancing chemical reaction equations as I spent a lot of the class showing about 4 students how to do them. When you add in the fact that whenever I explain maths to kids, they seem to get it, it really makes me question my career choice.
Of course the clincher for all this is that I'm not an English teacher ... I didn't stusy English at university, and I barely passed English in high school ... which is not the same as saying I *can't* teach it (I just was never interested in the Shakespeare, Coleridge & other 'classical' playwrights, poets & novelists that I studued at school) ... its just that I don't have any formal training to teach it (assuming you don't count the 2 hour 'How to teach English if you are a History teacher' tutorial at uni).
The attitude of students really doesn't help the cause, particularly with so many students who have little to no interest in learning (at least as far as the curriculum is concerned) ... there really must be something better!!

Poker Analysis

I find poker to be a very interesting game, both to play and to analyse. A very noteworthy hand that has been sbjected to quite a bit of analysis in various forums was a hand from the latest season of High Stakes Poker featuring Tom Dwan, Barry Greenstein & Peter Eastgate.
The particular hand is from the end of episode 2 of season 5 and features a hand with all 8 players at the table seeing the flop, with only the three mentioned (Greenstein, Dwan & Eastgate) continuing after the flop. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can view it here:

I posted my own analysis of the hand at the PokerRoad Forums, and thought I may as well re-post it here ... as well as a few additional thoughts now that some time has passed between the hand happening, being screened on TV, analysed in forums & magazines, as well as having the remainder of the season of HSP being aired. Be warned though, it is quite lengthy! There are also quite a few references to Barry Greenstein's 'Tips from the Bear' podcast, also over on PokerRoad.

My observations about the hand:

Pre-flop: Barry's raise is a standard play, it just happens that both Dwan & Benyamine (to Barry's immediate left) pick up calling (not re-raising) hands in QcTc & 33. Once this situation has been set up, EVERYONE else calls behind, primarily because of their positional advantage & who the players are in the pot - Dwan seems to have been involved in a lot of big pots & Barry raising UTG would mean that he would have a fairly narrow range. Of all the callers, Daniel appears to be the only one who takes any time about making the call (and he has the button!), and Eastgate even cracks a smile as he calls from the small blind, which to the observant player signals that he is calling with junk.

As Barry said, this is a situation he has never been in (raising UTG with AA & having ALL 7 others call him) ... so he needs to proceed with caution! Poker is a game of incomplete information which requires adjustment and re-evaluation based on the information you have at the table. A further complication for Barry is that there are a few players who he has not played much with in cash games (Dwan, Eastgate & Sahamies), so he does not have the information about their tendencies & styles that he does about people like Brunson, Elezera, Benyamine & Negreanu.

[Math break] Pre-flop, the hands that have more than 12.5% equity in the pot are Barry's AA (23.9%), Dwan's QcTc (16.2%), Benyamine's 3d3c (16.4%) & Sahamies' 7h6s (13.3%) - I find this interesting as hands like J9 & Kxs are hands that many players suggest playing in limped pots/late position, but they are actually -EV pre-flop in this situation. [/Math break]

Question: Why do people raise pre-flop with Aces?

Possible Answers: Thin the field, take down blinds/antes amongst many others, but the pre-flop raise did not accomplish these goals!

The flop: 2cTd2s

Is this a good flop for Aces? Conventional wisdom says yes - you should only be behind 2 hands, someone with TT & someone with a 2 in their hand. Conventional wisdom would also suggest that anyone with TT would re-raise pre-flop & players would be unlikely to all a pre-flop raise with a 2. In addition, the board is uncoordinated & rainbow, so no flush or straight draws are in anyone's hand at this point, so in all likelihood AA is ahead on this flop.

Barry leads for $10k (about half the pot). By Continuation betting, he is playing his hand almost face-up. He can’t make this bet with a hand like 88 or 99 (chances that someone has a Ten or better are very high). He would also be highly unlikely to make this bet with a hand like AK or AQ. This effectively narrows his range to AT or TT+, with the most likely of these being a big pair (QQ+). Barry says that he can’t have TT because he wouldn’t lead at that flop, however what would he be hoping for if he actually had TT in that spot? Surely in this situation, you’d see it being checked around on the flop (or Dwan bets, Eastgate raises or calls & Barry either flat calls behind or moves in on the flop depending on the size of bets/pot/stacks), but either way this finishes with Barry winning a large or a huge pot! He says that it wouldn’t seem unusual to check the flop when it is 8-ways when you were the pre-flop raiser, so why bet with AA in that situation?

Dwan raises to $37.3k. I think this is a perfect example of a raise for information. Dwan has a reasonable hand (top pair, decent kicker) and wants to find out where he’s at in the hand.

[Hypothetical digression]Imagine for a moment that this was a $1/2 online limit game. You have a raiser in first position and he gets called in 8 spots. He fires a continuation bet, and you are next to act with top pair, decent kicker. Do you automatically fold, thinking ‘If he’s betting into 7 other players he must be able to beat a ten!’?
I’d think that it would be better to raise to find out where you are at in the hand. In limit, it is generally a bad idea to call raises because of the problem of relative position – if you flat call and then it gets raised behind you and the initial raiser re-raises, you are now facing 3 bets in poor position. If you re-raise, you have position on the pre-flop aggressor, and any potential re-raisers now have to consider two possible threats to their hand, meaning they might be more likely to call and play the hand passively, or re-raise with super-strong holdings only. Why should the problem of relative position be a concern only for limit players? [/Hypothetical digression]

[Hypothetical situation]Imagine that with action to him, Negreanu re-raised on the button to something in the order of $85k … what would happen to the hand? I think Eastgate is in no-man’s land with his 42o & has no choice but to fold with a bet, raise & re-raise behind him as he probably doesn’t have the best hand with the given action, nor is his hand likely to improve in any way later in the hand. Barry might consider that Dwan is making a play, however having Negreanu re-raise him would tell Barry that in all likelihood his AA is no good, so he would fold. Dwan is then stuck with top pair medium kicker facing a re-raise and potentially playing the rest of the hand out of position, so he would likely fold also … meaning Negreanu would have taken down the pot! Of course it takes balls the size of watermelons to make this kind of play, but its there as a possibility [Hypothetical situation]

Eastgate calls the $37.3k. Based on his image and earlier play with the A6 v Dwan’s 76 on the 6536K board where he simply called Dwan down (Episode 1), his call on the flop narrows his range significantly – he has a 2 and only a 2. He could not have TT in that spot or he would have re-raised to reduce the field (and not given the ‘I’m calling with junk to make it a family pot’ smile). The only issue is his kicker. The fact that he called on such a dry board with a bet & raise in front of him would suggest that he has a weak 2, or he would have re-raised to try to get Barry out of the hand. He obviously considers Dwan’s possible range to include a 2, and with 42o, the chances that he has a worse 2 that Dwan are very high.

Barry calls the extra $27.3k. In Tips from the Bear he talks about Eastgate’s call being so strong that he felt he was beaten by him and that his initial reaction was to fold. This was the right thinking, however he simply considered Eastgate as having TT or a 2, rather than trying to consider his kicker as well and what he would do with a hand that had a weak or strong 2, and how that might change his betting decision on the flop. Barry then talks about how because it was Dwan who made the re-raise, Eastgate might have been thinking about trying to play the pot heads-up with Dwan & taking the pot down with a hand much weaker than Barry’s Aces up. Barry also mentions the possibility of catching an ace on the turn or having it checked through on the turn & having two chances to hit his ace. This situation of the hand being checked through on the turn would only occur if an overcard to the ten came on the turn, as Dwan could fear that Barry had filled up with a Q, K or A on the turn. Barry lacks a plan of what to do with the hand on the turn – he’s playing ‘let’s see what happens’ poker, which is rarely good at any level, let alone when you’re playing in a game as big as $400/800/200 NL. The other thing to consider is what Eastgate thinks of Barry’s call on the flop. He can be confident he doesn’t have a 2, but would Barry lead into 7 people & flat-call a raise & call with TT? He could also have in mind that Barry has an overpair, but the call might make him consider the possibility of Barry having him crushed with TT.

The dilemma that both Barry & Eastgate face is that their hands are fairly well defined (overpair & weak 2), while Durr’s hand could literally be any two cards!

The turn: 7d

Eastgate & Barry check to Dwan. This seems fairly standard, but it allows Dwan the freedom to choose his next move at will. Obviously the bet he chooses is a very good one, but given that the turn is a complete blank, which has almost no chance of hitting any player in the hand, it puts Dwan in complete control of the hand.

Dwan bets $104.2k. Its official: Tom Dwan has big balls!
This bet is based on the earlier play of the hand, as well as previous hands. Dwan knows that Barry has a big pair and he knows that Eastgate has a 2.Based on the earlier hand when Eastgate had A6, he knows that he’s not likely to play it strong, so might be able to get him off the hand. He has even more reason to believe he can get Eastgate to fold a 2 because Barry’s in the hand as well, and even if Eastgate thinks he was Dwan beat, does he think his weak 2 beats Barry’s hand as well?

Eastgate folds the best hand. Yes, he’s played a dodgy hand out of position & got himself in a tough spot. Yes, he seems to be playing scared money. Yes, he has bought in for too much, and can not raise and be willing to put his whole stack on the line confident in the knowledge that he has the best hand. However, he can’t be sure where he is in the hand without raising, and that opens him up to either throwing away about $220k to find out that he’s beaten or hoping that his 2 is good for $500k. His fold (after the play on the flop) seems like a reasonable one to me.

Barry thinks about what to do and folds. Barry said the speed of Eastgate’s fold made him re-evaluate the situation. Remember his thinking on the flop – he’s probably beaten, but he wants to see the turn hoping that he can either spike an ace, get the hand checked through, or somehow find himself in a situation where Dwan is bluffing, but Eastgate is calling with a hand worse than Barry’s aces-up. How does Eastgate’s fold change Barry’s thinking about the hand? In his mind, Eastgate now doesn’t have a 2, so why would he call the $37k on the flop? Perhaps Barry thinks that he was making a move, but if he was, why check-fold? Surely a more logical play if he was making a move would be to lead at the turn, putting Barry in the awkward spot & potentially leaving Dwan to deal with Eastgate’s bet. Barry then considers what hands Dwan could call with where he has a 2, and A2 suited seems like the only one in Barry’s mind. He mentions not considering the suits of the aces he held, however even so, A2dd was still a possible holding for Dwan (he obviously doesn’t know that Eastgate has it). Given that he has played relatively few hands with Dwan, and seems to be basing a lot of his reads on his reputation rather than actual observation and table time, so Barry’s fold seems like something that is reasonable – he did say that Dwan’s bet looked like he had a 2 with a better kicker than Eastgate’s.

Summary: Dwan’s play is an excellent example of the power of position and betting in no-limit holdem.

Afterthoughts: After seeing the entire season of High Stakes Poker, which had Dwan at two of the three playing sessions for their entirety, and one for a decent length of time, it has occurred to me (and I'm sure many others) that Dwan is indeed one of the best, if not the best, deep stack cash game player in the world. His ability to analyse situations and make excellent decisions time and time again are testament to his ability and skill. If you include his heads-up session at the Aussie Millions Cash Game Invitational against Patrik Antonius where Antonius was running like a Kenyan possessed by God (he finished about $500k ahead in a rotation of $1000/2000/500 NLH & $1000/2000 PLO), it really shows how good the guy is!