Recently, I have been playing $40-$80 hold’em at the Venetian. They have built one of the most beautiful poker rooms in the world. Here is the story on the $40-$80:

First, as a promotion, they are only charging $6 per hour to play. In addition, you can accumulatecomps on your player card at the rate of $3 per hour. In the evening they bring in a lovely assortment of cheeses, crackers, breads and fruits for the $40-$80 players. It is nice to have a light snack while playing. Let’s see… you can order food (very good) from the Venetian’s excellent coffeee shop (Grand Luxe Cafe) and the staff will get it when it is ready (price deducted from your comp card). There is a no-rake jackpot (4-tens beat) that probably does not matter, but it’s there.

And, if you play a WSOP event and bring in your coupon that day, Venetian will comp your time for 6 hours. The games have been fun and the crowd that plays there is quite nice. If you are in the area and play this limit, stop by. You will be impressed.

So after my excellent prediction the the Series might be less crowded than people thought, the first event was sold out long before the day of the event. 27oo was the max, after which , they allowed 400 alternates and then they cut off buy-ins. If you showed up the morning of the event to register you had no chance.

(Do not read the below if you like to get your results from TV months after the events).

I said I was not going to report things you can find out eslewhere, but I must congratulate Mike Sexton on winning the Tournament of Champions and the $1,000,000. Nice freeroll. The final table lasted 17 hours and Mike’s heads-up duel wiith Daniel Negraneau lasted over 6 hours.

Mike is one of the nicest and classiest guys in poker. He has done wonders for the game, and for himslef, as the face of both the WPT and Party Poker. This latest victory is very well deserved. I am very happy for him.

Mike had been talking aobut changing his No Limit tournament approach to be more aggressive, and I look forward to asking him how much he did change for this event. Nice job, Mike!

It’s World Series time in Las Vegas, and the crowds of players are starting to assemble. I don’t think the events will be as big as everyone is forecasting, as summer vacation is family time for many players who also have lives. But it will still be very big.

I will be stopping by the Rio from time to time and if I see or hear anything interesting, I will post it here. I certainly will not try to cover anything you can read on the major sites that do interviews and results.

I have been playing a bit more 80-160 and 100-200, being very selective in picking good games. Low limit players often think that everyone who plays at limits like that play at least decently, but that is not so. True, some play extremely well, but others are there to have fun, match wits, get drunk, or test themselves against good players or simply play at a limit their bankroll finds interesting.

I want to say a quick word about being bluffed. Many players feel that being bluffed out of a pot is a humiliating and degrading experience. If they fold and someone shows them a bluff, they feel an anger/shame that they can’t explain or quell. They want revenge; they want to hide; they want to bluff they guy right back.

All of this is silly, of course. Everyone gets bluffed. Everyone (give or take) makes a successful bluff now and then. Some way more then others but sooner or later everyone bluffs and wins. And, sad to say, good players get bluffed more often than bad players, as good players can figure out what (they think) is going on, or recognize scary situations, and fold.

Sometimes you should fold even knowing the opponent might be bluffing. You have QhTh on the button and open-raise. The big blind calls. The flop comes As7d6d. The big blinds bets out (or check-raises). What do you do? Well, a few of you get stubborn and try to steal it (back?), but most of us fold. The pot is small, we have no hand/no draw, and the opponent is telling us he has something. Sometimes he will have a pair (A, 7, 6 or pocket). Sometimes he will have a flush draw we can beat. Sometimes he will have a flush draw we can’t beat. Sometimes he will have nothing.

But unless he makes a habit of this kind of play, we fold and move on. But now he shows us 4d 3d. We were bluffed! OK, that was one of the possible hands he might hold and he made a good play. And if we call, he will still win 62+% of the time. But even if he shows us 3c2c and had no real draws, we still could not have called unless we were peeking.

In baseball, sometimes a guy strikes out and sometimes he hits a home run. Life goes on. And the same happens in poker. You and I will get bluffed sometimes. You need to continue to make quality decisions without regard to any emotion you may feel. That’s where profits come from.

Well, I didn’t in anything in the PokerStars freeroll, so there is no news there.

The following hand is from my forum (thanks again for posting and replying), and it attracted a lot of attention. I promised I’d comment on it here, and will do so now. You can find it on the forum in the cash game subhead under the title “Miss a Bet here?” by WindyCityJ.

Briefly, Windy held Q-10 on the button after everyone folded and he raised. Only the big blind, a very loose, aggressive player, called. The flop came A-Q-10 and LAG bet, Windy raised (good!) and LAG called. The turn was another ace, and LAG bet out again, representing an ace, presumably. Windy called since he now had three-pair and his Q had a mediocre kicker. The river was a third ace, and the LAG bet again. Windy called, and won, but wondered on the forum whether he should have raised.

Let’s answer the question first. When considering a raise on the river, you need to ask yourself what hands your opponent will call with and what hands he will reraise with. It makes no sense to raise if he will never call with a worse hand and always three-bet with a better one. It does not matter how often you are ahead, only how often you will get called when you are ahead.

In this case, it is tough to find hands he can call with. Copoka suggested KJ, TT (which I guess means any hand with a ten), and JJ. None of these would be calls made by most players, but I do concede that KJ and TT might call out of frustration some of the time. Very few players would play either KJ or TT this way, but yes it is possible.

The case where he has KK is not really important because if he does, he would call the raise and you would lose. Really, the only relevant case is the one where he has an ace. A player with an ace might indeed play it the way he did. Bet the flop and flat call the raise on the scary board. Bet again when the second ace came, and be forced to bet the river when he made quads. There are 44 ways he can hold an ace in this situation, and he will three-bet every one of them on the river. Compared to the hands he might foolishly call, I think the check on the river has a clear edge.

So I check here, because the hands he might call with are ones he could also easily fold, but the hands he will re-raise with are very clear-cut. Perhaps I play with a better group of players than some of you do, and if you are playing with guys who will play the hand this way and then call the river with, say, 88 because they made a full house, then a raise could be in order.

A quick word about poker math. Once play starts, the chances a player has a particular hand are not the same as the chances he was dealt it. If we walk over to a player before the flop, tap him on the shoulder and say, “What are the chances he will get two kings?” the correct answer is of course one out of 221. But if we walk over during a hand and he has three-bet pre-flop, his chances of having kings are much greater, though exactly how much greater depends on the player (Howard Lederer is more likely to have them than Carlos Mortenson is).

So it is true that if a player gets dealt an ace, the chances are very much against him getting quad aces. That doe not mean that if three aces on are on the board, the odds are the same long shot that he does not have an ace. And if he is actually betting, the chances he has an ace continue to increase. Lightening is unlikely to strike you, but if it does, it does not help to discuss the fact that it was a long shot.