Contrary to the fancy image seen here, The Thinking Poker Diaries Volume 8 is actually available only as an e-book. It’s on sale now in the Kindle Store, and EPUB, Kindle, and PDF versions will be available on Nitcast.com shortly.

WSOP 2013 Trip Report, Part 4: The Main Event – Unfortunately this is a lot shorter than it’s been in past years, but I did get to play a pretty famous player: “Usually, tough players make it clear that they are going to put pressure on you constantly.That’s not how Doyle played. In fact, I can’t tell you what exactly he was doing, but it was working. In the first couple of hours, he shot up from his starting 30K to over 50K without winning any particularly large pots. He never projected the image of a bully who was pushing too hard, but he raked in a lot of medium-sized pots without showing his cards, which is pretty much the hallmark of a good player.”

Holding Your Own – On that note, here are some thoughts on playing with players who are better than you: “If you play poker for challenge and entertainment, then maybe you welcome the chance to test your mettle against top-caliber opposition. One of the cool things about poker is that anyone can find himself playing with a legend of the game, and matching wits with one of your idols can be an awesome experience. Still, you might as well give yourself every advantage you can in the confrontation to come.”

Small Stakes Tournament Player’s Guide to the WSOP, Part 2 – You may not be bankrolled for the Main Event, but you can still have a great WSOP summer on a small bankroll and a tight budget. Carlos Welch tells you how: “Last month, I suggested tips for setting up your stay in Vegas in part 1 of this guide. This month, I will recommend particular games, locations, times, and opponents to play against. If you follow these guidelines, you should have a good chance of leaving Vegas with more money than you brought.”

WCOOP Heads Up Hand History Review, Part 6 – This is an addendum to a Tournament Poker Edge series from last year’s WCOOP. I played an interesting match in this year’s $200 heads up event that was worthy of inclusion. If you’re not already a member of TPE, you can sign up here.

“By the end of Day 1, I was playing deep-stacked PLO8 with relative comfort, even with Mark Gregorich, author of the O/8 chapter ofSuper/System, at the table. He actually complimented me on a sort of tricky slowplay, which was great for the old ego.”

In other Two Plus Two news, recent podcast guest Carlos Welch also has an article in this month’s magazine. It’s the first in a three-part guide for small-stakes players who want to spend a summer in Las Vegas:

“This is a World Series of Poker (WSOP) guide for small stakes tournament players. It should be useful for those of you who dream of experiencing the magic of the WSOP but don’t have the bankroll to play for millions or the skill to play with top players. This is for the grinders, the modern day near-Moneymakers who bubbled the $40 satellite, but still want to live the impossible dream. I’m here to tell you it’s not impossible because I just did it. I spent 45 days in Vegas with less than $3,000 in my pocket. I rubbed shoulders with giants and returned home with more than twice the bankroll I brought with me.”

And regular podcast contributor Two Plus Two Pokercast!

Day 1 was an experience. I was at the feature table (though I think ESPN’s coverage doesn’t really start in force until Day 3 so they won’t be featuring much) with Doyle Brunson on my immediate left for the entire day. I’d never met him before, and while I know it’s cliche to say it, it really was an honor to play with him in this of all tournaments.

An expensive honor, to be precise. I didn’t do much for the first six hours, just hovered around starting stack, then I nearly doubled up with a full house in a 3-bet pot. That got me up to 67K, some of which I bluffed off to Doyle and some of which I invested in some draws that didn’t get there. I finished the day with 17K.

I don’t do this often, but if you don’t follow me on Twitter, I’d encourage you just to look through my tweets from July 7. Frankly I’m proud of them, and a lot of people have told me that it was fun to read these little observations from playing and talking with Doyle.

Of course it occurred to me that he’d be an amazing podcast guest, but I couldn’t screw up the courage to ask him. We got on fine but I don’t think I ultimately made much of a connection with him while we were together, and by the end of the day he looked exhausted and like his back and legs were giving him a lot of pain – definitely was not giving the impression that he wanted to stick around and chat about an exciting interview opportunity.

Day 2 got off to a really good start, I doubled up pretty early with KK > AK, then again with 33 > KQ on a KK33J board. I got as high as 125K but again some questionable bluffs followed by a run of cards that left me unable to capitalize on my screwball image ground me back down.

Towards the end of the day I changed tables for the second time, and I was actually really proud of myself for the restraint I showed there. I didn’t get any premium hands the whole time I was there, and the few times I raised with decent hands I had the discipline to let go of them when I met resistance. I also didn’t let myself get too gunshy about bluffing and managed to find a good spot to squeeze and increase my stack by about 30% without showdown and without putting all my chips in the middle. So although I ended the day with just 20K, I found something to be proud of.

Finally, if you’re interested in catching up on my WSOP exploits from earlier in the summer, the first part of my trip report is now appearing in 2+2 Magazine.

Strangely, it seems to me that set mining in a 3-bet pot has better prospects. Say now UTG has 22 and button 3-bets to 12 with AA. Button can’t pot control with AA in a 3-bet pot so UTG EV is 10% of 112 less 2% of 96.5 or about 9 compared to the additional outlay of 8.5. Of course 3-bettor does not always have a hand to stack off with but if they are going to check-fold a significant number of flops then this might make up the difference. But everybody writes that shouldn’t call 3-bets with 22 – 77 and even with 88 it is necessary to bluff raise or float to make it profitable.

After playing a little on-line I am trying to develop some basic strategy for opening, calling, 3-betting etc. Trying to reconcile all the conflicting opinions and get it to make GTO sense is making my head spin!

A: Very good question. Your first instinct is correct: it’s not profitable to play a pure set-mining strategy (meaning you give up 100% of the time that you don’t flop a set) against a player capable of pot controlling and/or getting away from strong one-pair hands such as overpairs. Sometimes you’ll flop a set and he’ll have nothing, sometimes you’ll flop a set but win only a medium-sized pot, and sometimes you’ll flop a set but lose anyway. There may even be circumstances where you flop a set and end up folding to a bluff (ie you hold 55 on a 5d 6d 7d board and he triple barrels Ad K or something). The point is that, as you say, the implied odds aren’t there unless your opponent simply can’t fold a strong pair no matter how obvious that he’s beat. A few things follow from this.

Against a player who can fold a hand like AA, you should sometimes represent a set when you don’t have one (though not necessarily with a whiffed small pair). Suited connectors or other draws are generally the best candidates for doing so. This general strategy actually goes all the way back to Doyle Brunson’s Super/System: play your draws aggressively, and you’ll either get lots of fold equity with them or get more action for sets and other big hands (or ideally both). My recent mailbag post about suited connectors, which was actually the impetus for this question, may be of some help with this.

Secondly, you can’t afford to fold every time you miss a set. The more resilient your pair is unimproved, however, the more you can justify calling with a strategy that sees most of your value coming from sets but some coming also from picking off a bluff or two and/or running a bluff of your own. This, I assume, is why you distinguish small pairs (22 – 55) from the larger ones; the larger your pair, the more boards there will be where you can profitably call a bet or three. My recent mailbag post about chasing a gut shot explains the more complicated implied odds involved in such a calculation.

The important thing to remember is that your opponent isn’t a god. If you have the advantage of position, then he shouldn’t be able to win the pot every time you don’t flop a set but also get away cheaply every time you do. If he bluffs a lot, you’ll call down unimproved more often, sometimes losing to bigger pairs but overall showing a profit. If he gives up big hands to resistance, then you’ll give up pocket pairs unimproved but bluff often with a different set of hands. And if he simply doesn’t give up, then you can indeed show a profit purely with set mining.

Do you have a question for the Thinking Poker Mailbag? Please leave it as a comment below!

Blinds are 150/300/25. The UTG is a very aggressive young Scandinavian with a huge stack. He opens to 750, and I call in the CO with 66 and 45K in my stack. Action folds to the BB, who calls. This is no surprise, as his VP$IP is about 50%.

The flop comes 732r. UTG bets about half the pot, I call, and the BB overcalls. Fish though he is, I don’t think he has many 2’s or 3’s in his range. I did once see him peel the flop with AQ unimproved, so he could just have overs, but I thought there was a good chance he had a 7.

The turn was a 9, and my opponents checked to me. There was nothing for me to do but check behind. The BB wasn’t the sort of guy you try to bluff off of a decent pair, so I had pretty much given up after his flop call. As this hand will demonstrate, though, you should always be paying attention and considering your options, even when you think the result is a foregone conclusion.

The river brought an A and completed a potential backdoor flush draw. The BB checked, UTG bet about half the pot, and suddenly I saw an exciting opportunity. I thought that UTG would bluff all of his air on this river, and that while he would also value bet his Aces, he was a lot more likely to have random suited connectors and broadway cards than to have random Ax.

The catch, of course, was that I thought there was a good chance BB had me beat. Station that he was, though, I still didn’t think he would overcall an Ace river with just a pair of 7’s. That would be bad even for him. So I called without too much thought, wanting to project confidence to the BB, who did in fact fold.

UTG showed QT, and I won the pot. I watched BB closely for a reaction that might indicate he’d folded the winner, but I got nothing one way or the other. I like to think that he did, though. Ever since reading Doyle Brunson’s famous story about calling the river with J-high in a 3-way pot to scare out the best hand and beat the third player’s busted straight draw, I’ve wanted to pull off a play like that. This wasn’t nearly as cool, but I was pretty excited about it nonetheless.

As a poker player, I found PBSK fascinating for a number of reasons. For one thing, there were a lot of little details about Bobby’s Room (the high-stakes section of the Bellagio poker room, named for Bobby Baldwin) and the people who play there that I didn’t know. Craig writes for a broad audience, but even as someone who is relatively in-the-know about the poker world, I came away with a much better sense of the culture and traditions of that game. There were even a few regulars I hadn’t heard of, which I suppose is in itself a statement about the nature of the game.

Title notwithstanding, the book’s truly central characters are Beal and Doyle Brunson, not Beal and Howard Lederer. Craig chronicles the two men’s parallel struggles, Brunson’s to herd a team of notoriously stubborn and independent poker players into a functioning team with a 10-figure bankroll, and Beal’s to find an edge against the game’s greatest.

For Brunson, there are logistical difficulties and personality conflicts. Few players could afford to take on Beal on their own, and in any event the banker insisted on playing heads up. Nevada gaming law requires any game to be open to any player, meaning that the only way to ensure one-on-one action was to give everyone who could remotely consider playing the option to buy a piece of “The Corporation”. This, in turn, meant getting everyone to put up hundreds of thousands of dollars and agree on who would play Beal when. No one was too keen on either losing his friend’s money or seeing his own money lost, plus Beal insisted on playing at inconvenient times such as during the World Series of Poker or at 8 AM.

This was no accident. Beal quickly realized that his only chance would be to push the pros out of their comfort zone by insisting on astronomical stakes, arriving in Las Vegas with little notice, and otherwise making things as inconvenient as possible for The Corporation. Over time, he also came to take elaborate measures to neutralize their potential advantages over him: sunglasses, headphones (to discourage conversation), a random number generator, a homemade abacus (sorry, you’ll have to read the book to make sense of that one), etc.

I found the insights into both the financial relationships that undergird the poker economy and the psychology of an amateur who would attempt to take on the best of the best to be quite interesting. PBSK isn’t just for poker junkies, though. In fact, the central conflict of amateur vs. professional makes it equally appealing to a casual reader with little or not knowledge of poker. The book is remarkably light on actual hands played or anything else that would require more than a passing familiarity with the game, and Craig does a good job of explaining what little the reader does need to know without ever boring his “insider” audience.

All in all, Michael Craig’s The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King is an interesting and fast-paced introduction to the high-stakes poker world built around an inherently intriguing story. Any poker player would enjoy it, and it would also make a great gift for anyone you’d like to educate about the vagaries of professional poker.

Full Tilt Poker, $2/$4 NL Hold’em Cash Game, 4 Players
LeggoPoker.com – Hand History Converter

SB: $784.80
Hero (BB): $800
UTG: $1,563.55
BTN: $824

Pre-Flop: 5 A dealt to Hero (BB)
2 folds, SB raises to $14, Hero calls $10

Flop: ($28) K Q T (2 Players)
SB checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($28) J (2 Players)
SB bets $24, Hero calls $24

River: ($76) K (2 Players)
SB bets $50, Hero raises to $262, SB folds

Results: $176 Pot ($2 Rake)
Hero mucked 5 A and WON $174 (+$86 NET)

Obviously this isn’t exactly the same situation. With my redraw, I would have a lot to gain by getting it in against a straight on the turn, but at that time I wasn’t sure he had a straight. Even on the river, I can’t be sure, but I am glad I got the chance to make this play. He tanked for a while before folding, so I really do think I got him off the straight.

One important thing to point out here is that I was nearly certain he didn’t have a boat. I didn’t think he would check two pair or a set on the flop, and if the J gave him two pair or a set, I don’t think he would bet that when there was a four-straight on the board. So I wasn’t worried about having him shove over this raise.