For as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve started every year with a series of posts about my poker-related goals and resolutions, and I’ve ended every year by assessing the progress I made towards them. I set goals for 2011- my most ambitious ever, actually- but now it seems pointless to even look at them, as Black Fridayrendered them more or less irrelevant.  The best laid plans of mice and men, eh?

A dark omen in Montreal.

I’m not really in a place to start setting poker goals for this year, either, since I have no idea what the year will look like for me, poker-wise or otherwise. Not since my final semester of college have I felt this level of anxiety and uncertainty about my future. Those Big Questions are back: Where will I live? What will I do? Who will the people around me be?

I’ve spent the last week and and a half fending off questions, some idle and some concerned, at various gatherings of friends and family. My recent life as a nomadic poker professional was strange enough to them that they’ve learned to accept without alarm the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be two weeks from now.

Online poker made enough mainstream headlines that random aunts and uncles knew something had happened. Explaining everything that’s happened to online poker and to me in the last eight months is a mouthful that hasn’t gotten much shorter despite the amount of practice I’ve had spelling it all out.

I want to be clear that I’m “anxious” rather than “worried” or “depressed”. There really aren’t bad outcomes, which is very reassuring. Making big decisions is stressful regardless, but it is considerable consolation to feel confident that everything will work out in the end.

The two big advantages that I have over my 21-year-old self are money and experience. I graduated from college with $10,000 in the bank, $50,000 in student loans, no job, and no plan. OK, I had a bit of a plan, but it was a stupid one.

I never would have predicted it, but poker proved to be the missing ingredient that salvaged that plan. It enabled me to live with my girlfriend in Boston, start a non-profit organization, and travel extensively. What began as a way to make ends meet while searched for a job has blossomed into a full-on career, a phenomenon that was highlighted when I joined PokerStars Team Online. Knowing that I was able to muddle my way through a period of anxiety and make a very satisfying life for myself once before gives me a lot more confidence for this go-round.

The funny thing is that after two years, the whole nomad thing was wearing a bit thin, for me anyway. I wanted a little more stability and to feel at home somewhere. This didn’t make its way on to the blog, but one of my goals for the year was to get more settled somewhere.

Fail. The girlfriend and I returned to Boston intending to settle in place there and work out some big decisions about where to go and what to do in the longer term. Those conversations were taking place in late February and March. You know what happened next.

The breath-taking scenery in the Canadian Rockies was just one of the many hardships I faced this year.

Suddenly I was driving to Montreal on Easter Sunday to open a Canadian bank account in the hopes that it would facilitate withdrawal of the money I had online. Of course that was before PokerStars painlessly returned US players’ funds and before that other site did the things that it did (or before we realized what was going on there, anyway). There was a last-minute trip to Madrid, and although I didn’t cash in the European Poker Tour main event, my third top-100 finish in the WSOP main event certainly took the edge off of Black Friday. Then two months in the Canadian Rockies, a European road trip, two months in Vancouver (featuring another deep run in a live tournament), camping in Death Valley (do you know anyone else who flies to Las Vegas to take a break from gambling?), then my mother’s house in Maryland for the holidays and some undefined period thereafter. You can imagine how quickly family members’ initial concern for my professional well-being melts away when they hear that list of “hardships”.

The only advantage that 21-year-old Andrew possessed over the man I am now was having his twenties ahead of him. Before all the 30-, 40-, and 50-somethings start rolling their eyes, let me clarify that I don’t feel old in the sense that my best years are behind me or that I’ll never have the chance to do all those things I wanted to or anything like that. As usual, David Foster Wallace captures the feeling far better than I could:

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.

OK, it gets a little too dark there at the end. My own feeling is that, “It’s not too late but it soon will be”. I’ve managed to make remarkably few major decisions or long-term commitments in the last eight years, but that’s starting to feel less tenable.

As a poker player, my instinct is always to gather more information, and there’s still so much we don’t know about the Whos, Whats, Whens, Wheres, and Hows of online poker in the US. Whether not I’ll be able to supplement my income by playing online poker has huge implications for what I do and where and how I live.

Carpet-Bagging the British Columbia Poker Championships

Poker has also taught me to play the hand I’m dealt and accept that the eventual outcome may not be under my control. At the moment, I’m looking no more than a few weeks into the future. I’ve got a few more days in Maryland, then I’ll be in the Bahamas for the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, then it’s a little vaguer but possibly visiting friends and family in some combination of Maryland, New York, and Florida, then in Boston for a Boston Debate League tournament, and then… well, that’s still a work in progress.

Skimming a year’s worth of posts actually turned up a quote that should conclude this little rant nicely. It’s from one of Jared Tendler’s post-Black Friday blog posts, and I originally quoted it in my own post-Black Friday post:

Right now you’re looking for answers. The problem is that some of you are so desperate for answers you’ll listen to almost anything or anyone. That desperation is very similar to feeling desperate to win. You’ll do almost anything to shake this feeling because the uncertainty is almost too much to handle.

The reality is that there aren’t many answers out there right now. If you try to force an answer too soon, you’ll be making the same mistake if you were forcing the action because you need to win money right now. You have to stick to a sound and logical strategy.

Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s make it a good one.

Some of you may have heard that Phil Hellmuth overslept yesterday morning and was getting blinded off in the tournament. Apparently Mike Matusow called security at Phil’s hotel and got them to enter his room and wake him up. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but I was still at my starting table with Russel Rosenblum and Sorel Mizzi when Phil came dashing into the Amazon room, with a floorman shouting after him about whether he knew which table he was going to.

Russel: I wonder if the floor is going to scurry to get me to my seat if I show up late.
Me: I don’t understand why Phil Hellmuth and Annie Duke aren’t getting the kind of shit that the Full Tilt guys are getting.
Russel: I don’t want to say too much here, but Phil and Annie are just paid spokespeople, whereas the Full Tilt guys may have been somewhat more that that.
Sorel: That’s… putting it very carefully.
Me: Yes, sorry, I know that. I guess I misspoke. I do understand why they don’t get as much shit as Lederer, but people still put money on UB because Phil and Annie were endorsing them, and those people are never going to see that money. I just don’t think Phil and Annie should be getting invited on stage at the WSOP like they’re the best and brightest in the poker world.
Sorel: But they’re just sponsors. They aren’t on the inside. They don’t know anything more about what’s going on behind the scenes than you do.
Me: Based on what I knew, I wouldn’t have worn a UB patch.
Sorel: But come on, if they are just throwing money at you…

I had to change the subject at this point, because the irony and Sorel’s total lack of self-awareness was getting too much for me, and I nearly said something pretty rude to him.

Security is Called

The table broke not too long after, which was very welcome, though my new table was still pretty tough. I went on a nice little tear and chipped up to 170K while acquiring a relatively aggressive table image. Blinds were 400/800/100.

I opened to 2200 with 33 in the CO. A loose French player called me on the BTN, the SB folded, and the BB, who’d been quietly chipping up with very few showdowns and seemed pretty table aware re-raised to 6800 with about 45K behind.

I wasn’t getting the right odds to setmine, and online I’d just fold this even though I suspect the guy is light. I don’t want to get it in pre, and it’s just going to be too hard to figure out where I stand post-flop. In live play, however, the added information available through tells makes it a little more feasible and call and evaluate, and that’s what I did. The BTN quickly folded behind me.

The flop came 742r. BB bet 7500, and I called. The turn was another 4, and he checked. At this point he had barely a pot-sized bet left in his stack, and I think there are a lot of hands he wouldn’t check, including big draws and vulnerable hands like medium pairs. This was either an elaborate trap with like QQ+ or he was giving up.

I had no delusions of getting him to fold a hand better than mine, but I didn’t want to give him a free card or a shot at bluffing a scary river, so I bet 9000. After a bit of thought, he moved all in for 24,500. Now I had to think.

This is another spot I simply wouldn’t get myself in online. Before I bet the flop I’d have a plan for whether I was going to call a check-raise. Live, though, there is more room to figure out exactly which part of his range he has and what he’s up to. I let him sweat for about 3 minutes and then counted out the chips for a call. He looked uncomfortable. I placed them gently in the pot. He tapped the table. I tabled my treys. He whistled. “Very nice call, sir.” He showed AQ. Q on the river.

Where it gets really crazy is that while he’s still stacking his chips, three guys from security walk up to him. Two of them stand back, flanking a third who taps him on the shoulder. “Finish stacking your chips and then we need to ask you a few questions, sir.”

Naturally the whole table is staring at this scene trying to figure out what’s going on. The player in question looks totally nonplussed. He stacks his chips and then leaves the table with them. “That beat was so bad it was criminal!” I quip after he’s gone, earning me a few groans from my tablemates.

The guy returned after just two hands and seemed unperturbed. Curious about what was going on, I said to him, “I wish they’d come a hand earlier.” He laughed. I heard the player next to him asking him what happened, and he said it was something to do with a friend of his and that everything was fine. He remained at the table until late in the day, when he shoved AJ over one of my raises. I called with 99 to eliminate him and win back about a quarter of what I’d lost to him in that earlier hand.

French Fish

As I previously mentioned, the guy on my left was a loose and generally bad French player. Blinds were 500/1000/100. A tightish player in the HJ opened to 2500, and I called with 77 in the SB. The poisson re-raised to 11,000 with 15K behind. I was pretty sure I was going to fold but gave him the old stare down first.

He’d been watching a movie on his iPad, and when he saw me looking for a read, he pressed play and turned his attention to his screen. I could see perfectly well that he wasn’t cheating, but I wanted to get a reaction from him, so I told him to put the computer away during the hand.

He removed his headphones and looked up at me. “What?”

“You can’t be on your computer during the hand.”

He sneered. “Whatchu going to do? Time.”

“You’re calling time on me?”

“Yes. Time.”

“OK. Put the computer away.” He made a point of putting his headphones back on and pressing play. I looked over at the dealer, who was doing nothing. She hadn’t even called the floor to clock me. Of course by this point I had all the information I needed to fold, but now I was upset that the dealer wasn’t enforcing the rules.

“Player has called time,” I informed her.

She turned to another dealer who was waiting to push her after this hand. “Am I supposed to call the floor if a player has asked for time?”

The floor finally got called and came over. I informed her that I twice asked this player to stop using his computer during the hand. She ignored me and started telling him that he would have 70 seconds to act.

“Time was called on me,” I told her.

“OK then you have 70 seconds to act.”

“Are you going to do anything about the computer?”

“First you need to act on your hand.” I folded without a second’s thought.

“You can’t be on your computer or phone while you have a live hand,” she informed him and walked away.

I thought there was some chance that his reaction was also an act and that he was trying to make me angry to get a call. He said something to me after the hand, though, which made me think he was legitimately upset.

The very next hand I got black Queens in the CO and opened to 2600. I was 110% sure that the poisson would at least call. He angrily threw 7500 chips into the pot. The blinds folded, and after a cursory glance at his stack (he had about 35K behind), I shoved a stack of orange into the pot. He snap-called and turned over TT like it was the nuts, which it pretty much was in that spot. I think there’s a legitimate chance that his angry chip tossing was an act and that he thought he was baiting me. I got no reaction when I showed the QQ.

The dealer went to deal the flop, and there was the Tc in the door. The other two cards were also clubs, so I had a lot of outs, but none of them got there. I calmly counted out an appropriate number of chips and passed them to him.

He finished the day with over 300K. I’ve got 135K, though, so no complaints here.

While I see tremendous potential here, the current Rush Poker application, playable on Android devices, hasn’t quite got it right yet. It’s close: the graphics are clean and crisp, the interface is uncluttered, and all of the information you need is easy to find and read on a small screen. The major problem is that the bet slider is extremely difficult to control. This combined with the generally short time to act allotted in Rush Poker games and the occasional lag left me intermittently timing out and folding or settling for a bet size that was merely in the neighborhood of what I wanted.

On my Droid X, the application was somewhat slow to load and connect to the server initially, but once it was up and running, the lag that I experienced on the Verizon network, even from rural Texas, wasn’t in itself unmanageable. The only problem is that it ate a second or so off of the time that I had to fiddle awkwardly with the bet slider.

The familiar radio boxes to “Fold to Any Bet” or “Call Any” aren’t available, which isn’t really a problem since you can only play one table at a time anyway, nor is there a chat box. When applicable, an “Auto-Fold” button appears prominently on the screen in case you want to fold and move on immediately to the next hand. Otherwise, buttons to “Fold”, “Call”, or “Raise” appear when it is your turn to act.

Clicking “Raise” brings up more buttons and a slider. Your options are “Minimum”, “Pot”, “All In”, or the amount that you select with the slider. Maybe I’m still new to the whole touch screen thing, having had my smart phone for only a few months, but I found it virtually impossible to pin the slider down on exactly the amount that I wanted. Playing 1/2 NL with play chips, I could reliably get within 1 or 2 chips of the amount I wanted to bet, but even lifting my finger off of the screen after selecting my size sometimes caused the slider to shift slightly higher or lower. In the half-hour that I played, I both timed out and made incorrect bet sizes more often than I actually bet the amount that I wanted using the slider.

To be fair, the application is still in its public beta testing and restricted to play money games. Hopefully they can either improve the bet slider or provide a virtual number pad to enter bets manually. Maybe it isn’t so bad if you’re playing on a tablet. What lag issues there are will presumably improve as cellular networks get faster. I wouldn’t recommend playing Rush Poker Mobile for real money in its current incarnation, but it makes me extremely optimistic for the future of mobile poker applications.

Prospects Are Bleak

The online poker language is not in the tax cuts bill that is going to the floor for a vote. Reid is talking about trying to attach it to something else, but this seriously hurts its prospects for passage. Many on 2+2 are relieved by that, but I am not so sure it is good news. The picture of an unregulated future painted by both the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) and others in the know is rather bleak.

The Status Quo is Bad and Getting Worse

This is the major point that the bill’s detractors largely fail to acknowledge. Things are not just fine as they are now. It may seem that way, especially if you are a small stakes player who hasn’t dealt with moving large sums of money, but the sites that still serve US players face major hurdles in doing so.

The Department of Justice, in shutting down the payment processors that move money back and forth between online poker sites and American players, has greatly increased the cost of doing business for the sites. Not only must they continue to find new and ever more shady (and presumably expensive, given the risks they are running) processors, but they must also eat the costs every time the DOJ seizes funds from a processor. Every time you hear about a processor getting shut down and tens of thousands of dollars seized, that is players’ money that the sites, to date, have always reimbursed in the interest of keeping business flowing. There may come a time when a site decides it is no longer worth it to keep reimbursing these funds and will simply send an e-mail to affected players: “Your withdrawal of $XXX has been seized by the US Department of Justice. If you wish to dispute this seizure, you can file Form DJ-889-7b in triplicate with the DOJ within 30 days of this notice. Thanks for playing at Cereus!”

If you aren’t aware of these payment processor complications, it’s because you have always dealt in small (<$2500) transactions and/or because the sites do their best to insulate you from these difficulties. No matter how bad things get for them and how much money they are putting up on your behalf, their incentive is still to convey the sense that all is well and you can continue to play worry-free. They are shouldering the risk themselves, and while they are certainly being well-compensated for that, there will eventually come a point at which the cost of doing business is simply too high.

So far, it’s only been money at risk, and the sites are making enough of that. Should the DOJ start indicting the individuals believed to own these sites, those individuals may lose their will to fight in a hurry. This is a particular risk for Full Tilt Poker, with its purported owners living high-profile lives in the United States.

My point is that there probably will not be much warning beyond what we’ve already seen. The sites have no incentive to hint at the complications they currently face, as this would only cost them business. Think Netteller. Everything will be fine until one day it isn’t.

Professional Poker Players Have No Bargaining Power

The PPA has done an admirable job of marshalling what influence it has. Some politicians are more honest about this than others, but the unpleasant reality is that nobody gives a shit whether you can make a living playing online poker. We are not in a position to dictate the terms under which online poker is licensed and regulated in the United States.

Those decisions will be made by interests and lobbies far more powerful than we. Whatever happens with online poker in the long-term will be the result of negotiation between social conservatives who generally oppose gaming and major US-based gaming organizations such as Harrah’s. Foreign sites like Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker do not get a seat at the table, and those of us whose who earn a living at the virtual tables don’t either.

The influence of gaming companies, especially in Reid’s state of Nevada, is immense. They literally are the economy of that state, employing a tremendous proportion of the population and generating much of the state’s revenue. We are not in a position to dictate anything to them. The best we can hope to do is capitalize on the ways in which our interests align.

This Bill is the Best We Are Going to Get

Democrats lost a lot of ground in the mid-term elections, including control of the Senate House Finance Committee and the House of Representatives. This bill is far from ideal for the professional player, but there is no reason to think that we are in a position to hold out for something better. Even individual Republicans who themselves have no ideological objection to gaming still have trouble supporting it for fear of alienating socially conservative constituents. If this bill fails, then we will have to hope that Democrats rally in 2012 and bother to revist this issue, and even if all of that happens, they are still going to be beholden to the US-based gaming industry, which is still going to insist on preferential treatment.

Even to talk about our “holding out” for something better is naive, because the truth is that our consent isn’t needed or wanted. We aren’t in a position to block this legislation even if we wanted to. Whether we professionals like it or not is immaterial.

As an academic matter, should we like it? The “blackout period” is unfortunate but not unworkable. I sympathize with the many pros are not able to absorb 15 months’ of vastly diminished income, but in the long run it’s a price worth paying for licensed online poker that can be advertised on US television, funded by US banks, etc.

Is the “blackout period” a deal-breaker? Perhaps not. It seems that Senator Kyl, not the gaming companies, is the source of this provision (though he still opposes even this version of the bill). He is a powerful adversary and not an easy one to move, but there are powerful and monied interests on the other side of this issue as well. The best we can hope for is a last-minute compromise on this point, but even if it can’t be achieved, the impression I get is that a bill containing blackout language will be better than no bill at all.

Other provisions, such as the size of the tax on revenues, are generally considered to be more than reasonable. Considering how hard governments rake their lotteries, we may even be getting off easy on this point. Given the opportunity, would we want to trade the blackout period for far higher taxation? I wouldn’t think so, which is all the more reason to prefer this bill.

The prohibition on non-US players, once a US-based market gets up and running, is the part I find most puzzling. I suppose keeping everything domestic makes matters much simpler, but it also forfeits billions of dollars in potential revenue. From the perspective of the US government, revenue from non-citizens is far more valuable than revenue from citizens, and if anything about the bill changes in the next few years, I would expect it to be this.

What Can We Do About It?

At the legislative level, very little. Pardon my cynicism, but the major decisions will be made by interests far stronger than us. We may have some room at the margins to haggle with details (according to the PPA, they were able to do away with pernalites for players on illegal sites that appeared in an early draft of the bill), but we simply don’t have the influence to fight the US gaming industry on their core interests, which unfortunately do include getting a leg-up on their foreign competition.

There is speculation that, should this legislation pass, it may be possible to play on second-tier sites such as Bodog and Cereus during the blackout period. I would advise you to be very careful if you do so. The long-term prospects of these sites will not be good in a world where they must compete, without access to the US market, against not just Poker Stars and Full Tilt but also gaming giants like Harrah’s.

Their incentive will likely be to make what short-term profits they can before being driven out of business by some combination of the DOJ and their competition. When they decide to close up shop, it will likely be without warning, and they may well take your money down with them. This wouldn’t even have to entail outright theft, though I wouldn’t put that past them, either. An unexpected occurrence such as a major crackdown on their payment processors could render them suddenly illiquid. If you believe that Cereus keeps player deposits in a separate account that is not used for operating expenses, I have some real estate to sell you in Florida….

If you are a professional poker player in the United States, this legislation should be a wake-up call for you whether it passes or not. You need substantial savings. You need a back-up plan. You need to know where your money is and how safe it is there. Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker are huge companies with solid long-term prospects that are not entirely dependent on the US market. Even if they stop serving US players, and even in the absence of legislation this is a realistic possiblity, especially for FTP, they are not likely to abscond with your money. The same cannot be said for smaller sites, especially those with a history of putting short-term profits above honest dealings with their customers.

There are no guarantees. As poker players, we ought to be accustomed to managing risk and making decisions with imperfect information. For my money, this legislation is the best bet we have. The next year or two may well be lean years for us, but if the eventual licensing and regulation of online poker in the US is handled well (this is also not a guarantee), then such a bill will be very good for us in the long-term.

In the absence of legislation, things will continue as usual for a few months, maybe even few years, but they will get very bad in the not-too-distant future. I fear that should that happen, we will all look back wistfully at this window of opportunity and regret that the “Reid Bill” didn’t pass. By then, we may be forced to settle for much worse legislation or even a worst-case scenario where the DOJ aggressively shuts down online poker sites serving US customers, seizes funds, and actively prosecutes players themselves.

Edit: Changed “Senate” to “House” with regard to which Finance Committee the Dems lose in January.

Since my November strategy article was about bet sizing in tournaments, here’s a spot where a small flop c-bet pays off for me:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold’em Tournament, 170/340 Blinds 25 Ante (9 handed) – Full-Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

UTG (t7361)
UTG+1 (t12190)
MP1 (t22373)
MP2 (t10640)
Hero (MP3) (t3813)
CO (t7853)
Button (t28840)
SB (t8164)
BB (t11506)

Hero’s M: 5.19

Preflop: Hero is MP3 with K, K
4 folds, Hero bets t680, 3 folds, BB calls t340

Flop: (t1755) Q, J, 3 (2 players)
BB checks, Hero bets t777, BB raises to t3060, Hero raises to t3108 (All-In), BB calls t48

Turn: (t7971) 2 (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: (t7971) K (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: t7971

Results:
BB had K, 7 (one pair, Kings).
Hero had K, K (three of a kind, Kings).
Outcome: Hero won t7971

Given how little I have left, Villain is going to shove or fold almost regardless of what I bet. Whether I have an overpair or a bluff, there’s not much of a need to bet big despite the wet flop texture. And as it turns out, underbetting also gives him room to get a little crazy.