Poker Articles

Cell Damage
By Tim Lavalli

Your cell phone or your PDA may be ruining your poker game. I mean it. I am even semi-serious. See if you don’t recognize yourself or your poker buddies in the player descriptions below. This article is about improving our game but first you have to be honest and admit that you have a cellular problem. Acknowledging you have a problem is the first step.

The first cellular observation first came to me last summer at the Orleans Open in Las Vegas. I made my notes then for an article tentatively called: “The Cellular Walk of Shame.” I never got around to writing that article mostly because it was a ‘humorous’ poker article and I find almost all ‘humorous’ poker articles to be .. well … not funny. At the Orleans, for the big tournaments, they close the poker room on the main floor of the casino and move the entire poker operation up to the convention level. To get to the tournament room you go up an escalator and then walk down a long, long hall past about a dozen smaller meeting rooms off several hallways, its about a hundred yard stroll. At the very end you find the “big” convention room packed with poker tables, it’s a very nice venue for a major tournament. So on one particular day, I bust out (It happens!) and since I have already seen most of my poker crew ‘standing&walking’ before me, I am on my way to the designated rendezvous point at the Alligator Bar in the casino.

On my long walk to the escalator I overheard this conversation. “He called three bets, sucked out with runner-runner, he had no idea what pot odds were, the turn was a blank, he hit it on the river and, of course, they were suited!” Yes, we have all heard this many times before but in this case the conversation was not one bad beat bum talking to his bored buddy back home; no, this was the conversation I heard as I walked down that long hallway and passed six different guys all talking on their cell phones. Only half a sentence from each guy yet the conversation stitched together perfectly. They all had a bad beat story and they all had a buddy at home to tell it to and they were all screwing up their game with a cell phone and the same old story. How does a cell phone call mess up your game you ask?

We all know, or should know, that your tournament is not one hand. Sure, you should look long and hard at that ‘last’ hand you played because 99%+ of the time, you lose that hand. I mean one guy and only one guy does not lose his last hand in a tournament, right? But a bad beat story is not analysis; a bad beat story does not improve your game, in fact, it reinforces that your loss was completely out of your control. You lost the tournament because of the guy with the runner, runner straight. Really? You weren’t in that hand and dozens of others before? He won the hand but you didn’t lose it? You know the right questions to ask: Could you have gotten away from the hand? Had this ‘guy’ made plays like this earlier? Did you even have to be in that hand with your ATo? Call your buddies and tell them to meet you at the bar; call your wife and tell her to hold dinner, you are on the way home; call your boyfriend and tell him to turn up the hot tub, you are on the way over to ‘relax.’ But do not! Do not! Call anyone and tell your bad beat story, at least not until you have done the complete analysis of your play for the entire day and not just the final hand. Sure someone wants to know how you did but are you CNN with a news flash or a serious poker player trying to improve your game?

There’s more to this cellular story!

While in Tunica last month, covering the WSOP Circuit events at the Grand for PokerPages, I saw another incident of the cellular creep into the world of poker. You decide whether this is a good or bad innovation. During a $1,000 NHLE event, I was walking the tournament floor and I noticed a player “going to his lap” after every fold. Well, of course, I was intrigued and when I got close enough I saw that he had a PDA device in his lap and a stylus in his hand. After every fold he keyed in four items, if he played the hand there was a lot more PDA pokin’. So I caught him at the dinner break and after a bit of negotiating here is what I discovered. He had gotten a tech at his company (yes, it is “his” company) to program the PDA to accept the four suits and thirteen cards with a graphic display. So after each fold, the player put in, with four strokes, the cards he had folded.

But there’s more!

Before the event, he programmed in his seat number and the starting placement of the button, so his position at the table was pre-loaded for each hand (the correction key to compensate for bust-outs and empty seats was not working too well that day). For the hands he played there was a second screen (which you got to by hitting ‘play’ instead of ‘fold’ after you entered your starting hand), the play screen had betting entries as well as the flop, turn and river cards plus it recalculated your chip-stack based on bets as well as blinds and antes.

But wait there’s more!

I had assumed all of this was for post-tournament analysis but I was wrong. At each break, the player hit the ‘send’ key and the action of the last round was sent to his personal poker guru, who would send back analysis and advice. There were several problems with the system in this its first trial run. First, of course, was the issue of using electronic devices at the table. The current solution was to record information only while at the table and only ‘send’ on breaks; but this delayed the returned ‘guru’ advice for almost two hours. Second problem, the interface could only transmit card and chip information for one player. If you lost a hand the ‘guru’ didn’t know what the other guy’s cards were. Finally, the player was so focused on his lap-toy that he could not possibly be getting any reads on the other players at the table.

Oh by the way, he busted out to a runner, runner flush that he never saw because he was busy keying in his all-in bet. I am not sure if he called his guru from the hall but I would take 6-1 odds or better that he did.

Let me be clear, I am against cellular creep in poker. Ban the devices! Ban the phones! Keep the wireless connect for those intrepid internet tournament reporters but let the players play poker with their wits and skill but no Pentium processors allowed.

Comments? Please send them to Editor@PokerPages.com.