Nat Arem's Blog

I’m sure most of you know who ackbleh is from playing against him or watching him on Stars.

You may also know his avatar, which is some form of a “black power”-like fist. While I’m not a part of the black power movement (anymore), yesterday I was officially welcomed into the ackbleh movement when I received my customized hockey jersey.

Front

Back

As you can see, this jersey’s awesomeness is only exceeded by ackbleh’s poker game. Anyway, thanks ackbleh and I’m honored to be a part of the club.

I was waitlisted at Cornell Law School.

Normally being waitlisted isn’t that much of an accomplishment, but Cornell was a reach for my application. The fact that I still have some sort of chance is nice to know.

So as you may or may not know, I’m in the process of applying to law school. This is the time of year where you finally hear back from schools, so here’s my status:

In:

1. Emory. This is a very good law school, although it was a “mid-range” school as far as my application was concerned. I didn’t consider it a reach or a safety.
2.-3. A few other places, one of which I have a scholarship too. I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to either one.

Waitlisted:

1. Washington Univ in St Louis.
2. George Washington.
3. Notre Dame.

All three of these law schools have similar reputations for quality. I’d be happy to get into any of them and I plan on staying on the waitlist. Supposedly, you stand a fair chance of getting in when placed on the waitlist, so I expect I’ll get into at least one, although it may be mid-summer before that happens.

Still waiting to hear:

1. Cornell. Cornell is a reach for me. The best I can possibly hope for (I think) is to be waitlisted. I will hear sometime this week, but a rejection is most likely in this case.
2. Fordham. I don’t expect to be rejected from Fordham, but there’s a good possibility that I’ll be waitlisted. An acceptance is also certainly within the range of possibilities. I would need to visit before knowing whether I want to attend, but it’s definitely a fairly strong possibility. I didn’t like the other New York City school that I visited, but I should give each one a good look before concluding. Fordham is generally considered to be the third best law school in NYC after NYU and Columbia (both of which are out of my range), so that’s a strong boost when it comes to looking for future employment.
3. Vanderbilt. I applied to Vanderbilt mainly due to its fantasitic reputation along with what I’d heard about it from an alum of the law school. If I get in, I’d have to visit Nashville to know whether I want to attend. Considering its top-20 status, it is right on the border of where my application fits in, so it’s really up in the air as to whether I’ll get in.
4. USC. USC has a great reputation as one of the best law schools on the west coast, or even in the country as a whole. I’d be pretty excited if I got in and there’d be a pretty good chance that I’d go pending a successful visit.

So all of these schools are supposed to be letting me know in the next week or two. After that, I need to put down a deposit somewhere — most likely Emory. The deadline to make my deposit is April 15th. That will secure my spot in the Emory class for this fall while allowing me to remain on any waitlists over the summer. In the case that I get into a school that I’d rather go to than Emory, I can withdraw from my spot at Emory and lose the deposit. I probably won’t know for sure where I’m going until at least mid-summer.

If you have comments about the schools that I’m considering, please let me know. If you think that I shouldn’t/should go to somewhere, please let me know why and what you’d recommend that I do. Also, please don’t tell me about how horrible the law profession is unless you have a solid alternative. I’ve gotten a lot of people (over 10) telling me “whatever you do, don’t go into law” … but I often can’t get a good career path recommendation from them. Anyway, I’d appreciate the advice.

Sorry about the lack of blogs lately, I’ve been busy playing poker and doing law school-related things, along with just being somewhat lazy about writing.

Across all forms of poker and at all buyin levels, I see endless betting mistakes. People bet when they should check-call, they raise when they should call, they check-raise when they should check-call, etc. Sometimes it’s tilt that makes them make mistakes. Usually, they aren’t really thinking through the possible outcomes of their options. But most of all, I find that people seriously misunderstand how aggression should be applied in poker.

Now, what do I mean by “playing for value”? It relates back to the fundamental theorem of poker, as outlined by Sklansky: “Every time you play a hand differently than you would have played it if you could see all your opponents’ cards, they gain; every time you play a hand the same as you would have if you could see all their cards, they lose.” So basically, if you decide to push a river where your opponent CAN’T call with a worse hand, but MAY fold a better hand, then you’ve gained some value there from the latter portion of the equation. In other words, always make sure that whenever you make a play, you are always giving your opponent a chance to make a mistake. If you push in a situation where your opponent can’t call with a worse hand and can’t fold a better hand, then you’re making a huge error by making things easy for your opponent. This may sound simple, but I see this mistake happen all the time across all limits.

The first thing you have to decide when making betting decisions in poker is the showdown value of your hand. There are some times where you’d LOVE to showdown (holding the nuts), some situations where you’re pretty confident you’re best and some situations where you’re on a complete bluff and praying for your opponent to fold. On every board, certain hands have certain values. Your hand value is also affected by your opponents, the action thus far, recent hands (ie, is the table on tilt), etc. As you gain more experience, you’ll gain more knowledge about hand strength in certain situations. For those of you who have played hundreds of thousands of hands, you probably have a really good feel for when the 2nd nuts just isn’t good despite the overall tremendous strength of holding the 2nd nuts on the river in any given hand. So how does this all affect playing for value? I’ll explain my thoughts.

If you’re on a bluff, then there’s ALWAYS value in playing in an aggressive manner. The TV adage you hear often is “he can only win this pot if he bets.” Everyone wants to buy pots, and you certainly have to do this sometimes if you want to be a winning poker player. Just playing great hands won’t get you anywhere against good players. The value in bluffing, of course, comes from getting someone to fold a better hand. That doesn’t mean that it’s the right overall play because it might be a situation where your opponent doesn’t fold often enough to make the bet worth it, but you are always getting some benefit from the possibility of a fold.

In the opposite scenario, let’s say you hold the nuts on the river. Is there value in betting? Of course, your opponent could, possibly, call with a worse hand. Once again, it doesn’t mean it’s the best play if you’re first to act, but you have, potentially, something to gain by betting.

In both situations above, you’re sure of where your hand stands in value to your opponents hand. The tricky situations are hands in the middle ground: TPNK, MPTK, one card J high flush, etc. You could easily have the best hand, but it’s pretty hard to win a big pot with it because your opponent will fold if you try to put too much money in the pot. And these are the hands where I see people make the biggest mistakes.

Example:

This hand happened in the last few days, but I am changing some things about it just to make sure no one knows where it came from (the player who played it asked me to make sure the details were not released).

25/50 NL, 6-max. Folded to the button, who makes a standard raise with KJs. SB folds, the BB makes it three times the button raise with AA, which is a standard re-raise in the game. Both the button and the BB are sitting with 10K, so they’re both deep. The flop is J33. The BB leads out for the pot, which is about 1K, the button calls. Turn J. The BB checks, the button bets about 2K into the 3K pot and the BB shoves his 7.5K into the pot making it 5.5K more to go. The button obviously insta-calls and wins the 20K pot.

The showdown value of AA is almost always high. There’s rarely a hand where I know for sure that AA is not good, although if I don’t improve, I am often uncomfortable playing a big pot against a solid opponent. Anyway, the BB should want to show down AA, even on a double paired board. However, obviously, the check-raise all-in didn’t make any sense because he basically gave away all of the potential value of his hand. Against most opponents, it’s impossible to get called in that spot by a worse hand. In addition, it’s also hard to get an opponent to fold a better hand as no one would fold a J and many people would still call with a 3. And some people say: “Well, the button doesn’t have a hand he can call with most of the time, so it’s okay.” Quitely frankly, that’s just wrong. If you think the button is bluffing, then why not check-call the turn? Then check-call the river. It’s a preferable way to get your money in the pot than check-raising the turn. While you still get stacked fairly often if all of your money ends up in the pot, at the very least your opponent could still be on a bluff when all of the money ends up in the middle. And you really don’t have to worry about draws on a 33JJ board when you have AA.

In retrospect, that hand seems simple and most people will probably laugh at that and say the BB is an idiot. That’s possible. However, I’d bet everyone, including myself, makes serious betting mistakes where we make things very easy on our opponent. Whether it’s raising a river just out of frustration or betting when check-calling is clearly preferable, we lose serious value by not giving our opponents a CHANCE to make a mistake. Pushing with AA there is a horrible investment. Raising a straight on a paired board with a made flush is a bad investment. Betting bottom set into a multi-way pot on the river when two draws got there is a bad investment. Sometimes, we need to let our aggressive nature go and realize the value of the check-call. Do I advocate folding just because a draw got there? No, not at all, as playing scared poker will lead to you playing losing poker. But you also have to realize, there’s often more value in getting to showdown in a different manner than what you may be used to doing.

After writing this, I’ve realized that I’ve attempted to tackle something way more complicated than is fit for a blog entry. I have a lot of thoughts on betting that I haven’t been able to communicate in this entry and there are a lot of points that I never even brought up. However, the bottom line remains: “Think before you act.” Remember, you should always be thinking: “Can he call me with a worse hand? Can I get him to fold a better hand? Will he bluff with a worse hand if I check? If I’m on a complete bluff, what will he fold? Can I get him to fold on later streets if I show strength here and a scare card comes? etc etc.” There are really endless situations where you need to think about the right way to play for value in poker. Just think before you act and always put your opponent on a range and you’ll find that your results will improve vastly.

Examining the process without consideration for the result is a very very basic concept in a mental warfare situation with an element of luck … aka, poker. And yet, despite that, I still hear endless results-oriented remarks on and around the poker table on a daily basis. While I know I won’t be able to stop most of it with this post, I want something that people can cut-and-paste to their results-oriented friends (so yea, if someone C&Ped this to you, then they probably think you’re results-oriented).

So for the people who don’t know what I’m talking about (hopefully no one), the process is your decision-making process. Let’s say you put someone on a range of 12 specific hands in which he’s equally likely to hold any one of them (not realistic, but it’s an easy example). Your hand is currently badly beating 9 of the combos, 2 of the combos are a race against you and one of the combos has you crushed. It should be obvious that if he pushes in, it’s an easy call assuming your reads are correct. But what if he ends up turning over the one that had you beaten badly? Do you care? Maybe. Should you care? No, not really. The ONLY thing you should be examining are your reads and how you arrived at your conclusion about your opponent’s possible holdings. If there’s a failure in your process such as you putting him on too many hands that you’re beating whereas he’s actually a tighter player, then you should fix that leak against that opponent and move on. What if you call and it was a race hand and you lose? Should you care? Still, the answer is no. If you arrived at your decision correctly, then that’s all you can do. It’s much much more important to consistently make correct decisions based on the proper reasoning than it is to actually be right or wrong when the cards are turned over because any given set of outcomes is mostly luck in the short-run.

Now I’ll walk through some of the things that I’ve heard lately which I find to be somewhat ridiculous.

1. While at a friend’s apartment, he played a few STTs, was down a few K and another visitor in the apartment commented: “wow, you could do a lot with a few K, it must really suck to lose that much in 20 minutes.” This is a prime example of result-oriented thinking. The key here was my friend’s expectation in those STTs. He didn’t actually lose in my opinion. In fact, since he’s a proven winning player in that game and at those stakes (he has a proven win rate over about 20,000 of them), I’d argue he actually WON. Of course, expectation is dependent on things like mindset and opponent skill, but over the long-term, those factors tend to even themselves out as well. So anyway, if my friend could “expect” to win $50 per STT, then in my opinion, he actually won $150 by playing three of them. The fact that he took a few beats and lost all of them is really not important.

2. Something you constantly see in chat at final tables when someone turns down a chop is the inevitable: “ur down a lot of chips lately, u shoulda chopped.” That’s pretty much retarded. MTT final tables are a HORRIBLE place for most good players to consider chopping. One way to look at an MTT final table is as a high-buyin STT that you spent 5 hours+ working your equity up high enough for. For example, the typical FT of the 55K 11r on Stars has over $40K in prize money, so that’s about a $4.5K buyin STT. And remember, most of the people at that final table are amateur players who might play $30 STTs or .5/1 nl cash games. Usually, only one or two experienced players make it to that final table and when they make it down to top 3 or 4, there is usually no justifiable reason to chop. Their edge is typically very large against the very poor opponents who remain and usually, the money is way out of the comfort zone for these players, so they play even worse. Therefore, you shouldn’t tell someone who is clearly more experienced and a better player that they should have chopped. Instead, commend them on making the +EV decision to keep playing and try to capitalize on their edge.

3. I’ll do one more since I want to go to sleep. On the show High Stakes Poker, a player recently got all in pre flop with AJ against the AA of Johnny Chan. In addition, he’d just come back to the table from the bathroom. Of course, the commentators went on about how if he’d just stayed in the bathroom A BIT longer, he might have missed the hand and avoided getting stacked. That’s just a horrible way of thinking about it. The player was an amateur and he almost certainly has a negative expectation against the line-up of players on HSP. Therefore, they’re probably right that he would have saved himself money by staying in the bathroom. But it wasn’t the amount of the pot, it was the amount of his negative expectation on any given hand. Just for rough estimation purposes, let’s say he expects to lose about $1K per hand at the 300/600/100 level of NL against this lineup (maybe $30K an hour with 30 hands dealt in the same time span)**. If that’s accurate, then he actually cost himself $1K by rushing back to the table. The fact that he happened to get stacked the very first hand back because he played like a donkey is pretty much irrelevant.

Anyway, I have more things to comment on related to poker, so I’ll be posting them in the future. It’s 6 AM, so I better get to sleep.

——-

Agreed, my numbers aren’t accurate at all. I was just making something up. The important thing to realize is that the equity that he “lost” by coming back is what he would lose on any given hand, not the amount he got stacked for. I agree it’s probably a decent amount less than $1K per hand.

Well, now that I’ve been home from Turning Stone for a bit I guess it’s time to write a blog where I say that not much has happened. I do have some random news on a few fronts.

1. I am starting to hear back from law schools. So far, I’ve heard back from three. I got into two and I’m wait-listed at one. I still have a few more to hear back from over the next month or so. Once I have my choices laid out, I’ll probably make a post offering my opinions on each possibility, then maybe I could get some feedback.

2. My sleep schedule is waaaay off. One of the problems with not forcing yourself out of bed in the morning is that you tend to go to sleep later and later, eventually finding yourself going to bed at 10-11 AM and getting up at 8 PM, thereby missing all of the daylight hours. I’m constantly struggling to stay on schedule. I got up last night at 1 AM after going to sleep in the mid-afternoon. I’m hoping to be able to stay up tonight until around 10-11 PM, then go to sleep and get up at 8 AM. After that, I’m going to try to stay on a good schedule for at least a few weeks.

3. thepokerdb has been really slow sometimes lately. I’ve had trouble looking up a player to the point where I was going into my timebank to wait for the results. Right now, we use something called a VPS, which stands for Virtual Private Server. Essentially, it’s a server that hosts more than one website, but has dedicated resources for each one. In addition, it looks to us like it’s just our computer. The problem is that the speed of the VPS is definitely affected by the other people on the computer. While the VPS has been okay overall, it’s too unpredictable. Obviously, that isn’t acceptable, so we decided to upgrade our servers.

Now we’ll be using what’s known as a dedicated server. This means that we get to choose our processor, RAM amount, disk system, etc. We went with a server that is designed for database heavy operations (all our users constantly looking people up), but isn’t overkill on the bandwidth end. The reason we don’t need a lot of bandwidth is that we only serve text information, which is very light compared to multimedia information. Sending a bunch of numbers and html to people over the web is very cheap, so we were able to save money on that end and throw a ton of resources in our RAM and processor. In the end, we should all see a huge performance increase on the db in the next week or so as we move everything over.

4. Like I said in a previous entry, I will be meeting up with schaefer when his baseball trip rolls through Philadelphia in early May. However, I recently decided to extend that trip with him to include visits to Boston and NYC as we’ll be attending games on May 7th and May 9th. In addition, I’ve heard credible rumors that MLG/anakinso will be along for some of that leg of the trip. I’m excited as I somehow have never been to Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium. In addition, the one at Yankee Stadium is a NYY v BOS game, so that should be good. The only downside is that they only have single tickets available, so we’ll all be sitting in different parts of the stadium.

5. 2+2ers are planning another Turning Stone trip, this one in mid-late May. It will co-incide with my sister’s graduation around the same time period, so I’ll probably do another Ithaca-Verona combo-trip of some kind.

That’s it for now. Since I’m going to be up for the daylight hours today, I should probably go get some stuff done while everything is open.