In tomorrow\'s DRF, in a move which will make David Rex and others ecstatic, DRF announces that it will run a weekly POKER column. I guess this is a matter of if you can\'t beat em, join em.
That\'s really not why I\'m pissed at Crist. With all of the topics worth addressing in racing, like drugs, like overhyped overpriced stallion prospects making early exits, like the various problems encountering NYRA, Churchill and Magna, Steven Crist used his very widely read weekly column in the Form last Saturday to make the following points which none of us ever would have realized without him telling us:
1) large fields increase handle, and
2) horseplayers like large fields.
Duh. Look, Steven, if you don\'t want to address racing\'s more political issues, why don\'t you make a push for a $1 pick six wager, the way you advocated 10 cent superfectas? Or will the Pick 6 remain a \"rich get richer\" proposition, available mostly to those with deep pockets?
Sorry if I diverted any attention from Sir Isaac Newton.
Rich,
The reference to Newton was an analogy in relation to the discussion on figure making methododlogy, which I assume is relevant on this forum. You will be glad to know that Newton would probably have supported the $1 pick six and his countryman, philosopher John Stuart Mill, would definitely have championed the dime superfecta on egalitarian grounds.
Bob
He was also one hell of a Hold-em player!
It sucks that he charges you to read the DRF articles on line. Like his journalism is superior to anyone else\'s. Get a haircut.
He only charges for certain articles(Columinists and handicapping),not the daily stuff.
Doesn\'t equibase has the right to all horse racing data and the drf as well?? That\'s wild. Why did the drf sell out?
If he had taken an interest in racing, Newton would have been a unique, or very close to unique, participant, based on his response to praise that he had revolutionized peoples\' understanding of how the world worked, which was, in words or substance, assuming I\'m remembering correctly: \"If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of great men.\" It is very rare indeed for anyone in racing in any capacity to give anyone else very much in the way of genuine credit for the contributions which made what they are doing possible. The interesting question, of course, is why.
RB –
I didn\'t read the field size piece you\'re talking about. (I won\'t pay for the \"Subscriber Only \" material online. It\'s not worth the money to me. I can understand why they charge for the handicapping pieces, but I\'ve never understood why they do so with the editorial pieces. Don\'t they want them read as widely as possible?)
That said, I\'m a big fan of Crist\'s writing. Way back when, I used to borrow the Sports section of the NY Times from someone down the hall to see if Crist had written an article that day. I can tell from the titles of some of his editorial pieces that he doesn\'t duck the political issues. He has certainly had a lot to say about NYRA.
With respect to field size, it may apparent to you and me that the industry should be pushing large fields, but the problem remains. The tracks keep offering large purses for short fields. The Woodward and Goodwood are two recent examples. On the flip side, I know that jockeys have been resistant to increasing field size too much, and I can understand their position, especially with cheap horses that are more prone to break down mid-race. The bottom line is that if the industry doesn\'t take steps to become viable in its own right, as opposed to relying on slots money, it won\'t last long.
On the $1 Pick-6, the big appeal of that bet (especially for tracks) is the possibility of a carryover. Reducing the minimum bet would allow people to play more combinations, and reduce the chance of a carryover.
Bit:
I appreciate your well reasoned response, and you make some of the same field size observations that SC does, all of which are valid. And I would never call into question SC\'s ability as a writer or his willingness to point his quill at some of the tough issues.
As to jockeys wanting shorter fields, I would hate to be flip with 2 recent fatalities among their ranks, but go into a jockeys room during a five horse race and ask the jocks who ARE NOT riding what they think of short fields.
This is not the first time I\'ve made the PICK 6 comment, and I do it if anything to point out that Crist, handicapper/ columnist/ NYRA employee/publisher relishes most the role of Pick 6 guru/ maven (his book Betting on Myself is a fun read)and might have a slight conflict of interest when it comes to letting some smaller players into the pool.
Question for BOBPHILO (I\'m assuming no relation to Philo Kvetch): Bit points out that there would be less carryovers with $1 Pick 6s; does it mean that the pools would be twice as large when there WAS a carryover?
richiebee Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Question for BOBPHILO (I\'m assuming no relation
> to Philo Kvetch): Bit points out that there would
> be less carryovers with $1 Pick 6s; does it mean
> that the pools would be twice as large when there
> WAS a carryover?
No, no relation to Philo Kvetch. I\'m glad someone remembers the old Soupy Sales show. LOL. Actually the philo is from my undegrad major, Philosophy.
Obviously, if there were less carryovers that would reduce the size of the next day\'s pools to that extent. Whether or not the next days pool would be twice as large would depend on the size of the carryover relative to the size of the next day\'s pool. That could vary considerably.
Bob
Mall,
That was a great quote by Newton but it\'s also true that he was notorious for his contemp for any kind of criticism directed at his work. He also engaged in a vicious defamatory battle with Leibniz regarding who had invented calculas.
After his nervous breakdown he devoted his later years to religious polemics.
He was undoubtably a great man who typified both the positve and negative aspects of modern racing. Believe it or not, this was not meant as a parallel with Jerry and Len. I meant it as an example of both the constructive and mean spirited discourse we see today.
Bob
Richie,
Not that you asked me, but I do agree with you that a $1 P6 would be a good thing for racing. For example, take a look at field size for BC and the possible number of combinations. Even with all the money in the pool (even large syndicate money) the best they could come up with is 5 of 6. Large fields combined with the $1 P6 would be a winning combination in my opinion.
NC Tony
Rich,
Upon further reading of your question I think I may have missed your specific point. I think what you were really asking was, will the pool for a geven bet be twice as large if the minimum amount of that bet was twice as large? I think the answer to that is no, or at least not necessarily. If a bet costs twice as much I think people would be just as likely to just play fewer horses in their combinations than play the more expensive bet. Especially so in a pick 6, that is already more expensive to play due to all the combinations involved.
I quess what I\'m trying to say is that doubling the price of something will not automatically bring in twice the money. It could very well bring in less. That\'s why I\'m in favor of the $1 pick six.
Bob
Bob,
If you look at the $0.10 super pools at Keeneland plus I think in Tx, but particularly at Keeneland this year you will notice both increased pool size and large payouts as compared to previous years participation in that pool. You have quite a bit more speculative money in the pool then you would have had otherwise.
NC Tony
Tony,
Absolutely. I know from my own experience that the main reason I rarely play the Superfectas, and never play the Pic-6, is the cost of the tickets compared to other bets. I have to play considerably more combinations to keep it from being a lottery-like proposition. Like Robert Redford said when he played a professional gambler in the movie Havana, "I like to keep the gambling to a minimum.". With the dime Superfecta, I can afford to include enough horses to make it more of an investment. I'm sure that's why more people play it and the numbers were up when Keeneland offered it.
Bob
Lets not leave out Remington Park
Bob,
It\'s almost a self fulfilling prophecy increase handle from $0.10 Supers lead to higher purses, which in turn lead to larger fields. Which lead to larger payouts.
We need to give the smaller time gambler large enough pots to shoot for.
NC Tony
Apparently no one, not even Newton,is perfect. A number of tracks, including CD, used to have $1 pk6s. The reason for adopting the $2 min, according to track execs, is that alhough, as pointed out, there would be additional daily handle if the min was $1, that additional daily handle would decrease the chances of a big carryover like there is at CD today. The increased handle on big carryover days is much greater than the increased handles on a number of individual days, so the $2 min makes sense, as a matter of economics, for the tracks. Another thing they told me re pk6s which I found surprising is that, as often as not, half or close to half of the handle on the big Calif carryovers comes from East Coast players, which they believe is due to the fact that most of the races take place after working hrs.
My only contribution to this string is that Andres Serrano would love it, and Guliani would hate it.
I\'m just saying.
TGJB Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My only contribution to this string is that Andres
> Serrano would love it, and Guliani would hate it.
>
> I\'m just saying.
LOL, Jerry. At first I had no idea what you were refering to but then I remembered that Andreas Serrano painted the controversial \"Piss Christ\" and Guliani tried to censor it.
Bob
How about allowing $1. pic6\'s but paying off at the fixed rate of $2. In other words, if one $1 bettor is the only one to hit the pic6, s/he\'s payoff is 1/2 the pool ; the rest gets carried over. If two bettors hit the Pic6 and one bet $2 and the other bet $1, then 25% of the pool get carried over, etc., etc. I think this would be the best of both worlds..plenty of carryovers and plenty of big payoffs.
Ok, Mathematicians does this work ?
The pick 6 at $2 is a scandal. Always was.
I suggested to Harvey Pack 10 years ago (or more, time flies) that it be lowered to a dollar or less.
The only reason to keep it to $2 is to make it harder to hit. More carryovers. But as stated, it gives a substantial edge to the syndicates.
Anybody notice that there have been three poker columns so far and all of them say the same thing -- i.e. do not go on tilt after a bad beat whether you are at the races or a poker table. Thanks guys for elevating our knowledge! The concept that poker bad beats are somehow worse than horseracing bad beats (Fornatale\'s column) is a grotesque joke.
So.cal man,
Bad beats in poker is like shooting yourself in the foot w/an m-16..ifyou fail to overcome it immediately...you\'ll end up killing yourself in very short order.
The ponies
are a slower more dignified way to blow our minds,and many of these ways can be attributed to the archaic rules of the game,(your horse is scratched prior to the race and the track tries to soothe your wound by offering us the favorite in substitution)
The powers that be in this industry come across to me as frumpy old geezers that no longer have a lock on gambling, yet continue to dictate their rules w/out reason.
A well written letter to the editor, which I\'m sure you\'re very aware of, in yesterday\'s drf makes these points quite well. The best hold-em player I know is the engineer I sometimes mention here, & he also holds the opinion that the very idea of a poker bad beat is nonsense, since that\'s the equivalent of differentiating between a \"good\" vs a \"bad\" statistical probability. I don\'t recall the incident in the Beyer book, but do remember the last leg of the biggest pk6 carryover in SA history a couple of yrs ago, where a horse with a clear lead very late suffered an injury & was passed & barely beat by a horse named, I think, Houston Rocket. I didn\'t see any explanation in Fornatale\'s column re how things will eventually even out for the guy who held the only ticket, worth approx $3 million, on the sure winner which suffered the injury. Then there\'s the guy who in all probability would have had the sole winning pk9 ticket at one of the West Coast tracks if a track maintenance worker would have done his job & not left the turf watering system on all night. The list in racing is pretty much endless, but the bottom line is that I\'ve played both, & most of the poker guys know about as much about bad beats as the gal in Gone With The Wind famously had to admit she knows about birthing babies.
Did someone hold the winning PK6 ticket on Houston Rocket?
That got him even for a lot of bad beats.
It will probably never even out for the loser in that situation because the long term probabilities won\'t be reached in his lifetime. The more day to day stuff like bad trips, late scratches etc... probably does.
The PK6 guy is approximately equal to getting close to the final table of the World Series with far and away the biggest stack and having several very low probability draw outs beat you on the river within a few hands to wipe you out. You\'ll never be alive long enough to get into the same situation with a small stack and draw out with a bunch of low probability hands on others to take down the whole thing.
Dear Speedkills,
Although I have suffered some awful bad beats (there is no way they will be balanced out with lucky wins in my life no matter how long I live), I think it is pointless to argue about which is worse, horseracing bad beats or poker bad beats. The columnist in the racing form argued that poker bad beats were worse than horseracing bad beats. I will repeat myself -- that is a grotesque joke.
The examples of absurd big dollar bad beats in horseracing are endless. In horseracing, you have to deal with Jockeys, stewards, placing judges, grounds crew, crazy fans who run out into the track (remember Preakness day a few years back), deer, geese, electricity, it goes on and on. If these situations arise when you\'re in the middle of your once in a lifetime exotic, what do you do? You suffer a legendary bad beat. The bad beats in poker are just not as unusual -- even if they occur at the final table of the WSOP and you are chip leader. Lets say there is only one possible river card to help a person out of the 44 cards left (you have 2; he has 2; and the board has 4), that is a 43-1 shot coming in. Basically, a roulette ball landing on the right number -- it has to land somwhere, they are all roughly the same chance. Things like that are normal course. They are not 1,000,000-1 occurences coming from nowhere to wreck everything. Even if the river beat happens twice in a row to wipe you out, that is less than 2,000-1.
More importantly, the person who catches you on the river is catching a card that by design is supposed to be there. The deck has a certain number of cards, and they are all equally possible of coming out. If the card comes out, you can curse fortuna for bringing it out at that time, but you cannot say it was collosally unusual that the 6 of spades was dealt. That card was a part of the game.
Remember, the columnist in the racing form said that bad beats in poker were worse than in horseracing because the bad beat in poker is caused by a bad player playing hands that should not have been played. If you are at the WSOP final table, chances are that none of the other guys at the table is a complete idiot, and they are playing chasing hands for a reason. Maybe they played the 9-10 suited against your AA because there were two other all ins and he had to go all in on SOME hand or else bleed to death and the pot odds made it worth it. Just because the guy pulled any of a straight, a flush, two pair, treys, etc. does not mean you lost a strikingly unusual bad bead. I have seen AA lose a ton of times to chasing hands. Maybe the very next hand you went all in with AA again, but this time another player thought you were blind/ante stealing (in response to your bad beat) and he went all in with 10-10. 10-10 is not a bad hand, if he pulls a third 10 on the river on the very hand after somebody else beat your pocket rockets on the river; this is bad luck, but not exceedingly worse luck than some of the things that have caused guys to lose in the horseracing.
Remember in Saratoga when the placing judges misread the saddlecloth and put the wrong number up? Now, if you are at the final table of the World Series of Poker and only the 6 of spades can beat you and the river is the 6 of clubs but the officials irreversibly declare that the 6 of clubs is actually the 6 of spades, then you just start to get a taste of what horseplayers have to deal with. How can losing a big winning pick six ticket because there is a revolution and they invalidate racing results not be worse than being beaten a few times in a row on the river at the final table of the WSOP?
In the end, I think this is a pointless discussion topic, but, remember, it was the \"professional\" columnist at the racing form that started this when he wrote that poker bad beats are worse than horseracing bad beats.
Let\'s all just hope that the DRF poker columns either get better or disappear. Hopefully, the next one will not be the fourth in the series of \"Do not go on tilt after a bad beat.\"
SCM2
SoCalMan,
I play both games frequently.
During the course of this year I hurled things across my home office, punched a sofa repeatedly, went into a cursing frenzy etc... while gambling. Each and every time it was poker that caused the emotional outburst. I can\'t remember the last time horseracing provoked that kind of negative emotion from me. It was certainly many years ago.
There are more opportnities for life altering bads beats in horseracing than poker because few people are playing in the biggest cash games or final tables of major tournamants daily, but a poker player will experience more horror show like individual hours of low probablity river beats in the typical month than a horseplayer will experience similar frustration in the typcial year.
If the articles are to get any better, they do need to start talking poker strategy. However, who wants horseplayers for that. Just read and absorb Sklansky/Miller/Malmuth books for limit, Harrington\'s books for tournaments, and Super System for NL and you\'ll learn everything you need to win from people that actually understand the game.
You no doubt already know this, but the expert player I was referring to recently gave me a layman\'s tutorial in poker bots, bots to detect & beat poker bots, common forms of online collusion, etc. The reality/perception of cheating in online games of \"chance\" is probably why one of the rules at http://www.dailyhandicappingcontests.com/main/, which is of some interest despite my showing at the TP contest Sun, is that all selections have to be in 3 mins before post. That way everyone in the contest can see everyone else\'s play before the race is run. Speaking of contests, Bill Spillane was at the 500 entry, sold out, 25 people on the waiting list, contest at Kee Sat, & added a variety of comp accts of different durations to the prize pool. Nice gesture, although one of the guys I was sitting with pointed out that those who finished near the bottom needed the extra help a lot more than those who secured one of the three qualifying spots in a very, very tough field.
Speedkills,
I agree that horseracing bad beats are much rarer than poker bad beats. Personally, I have only suffered five bad beats worth remembering in 29 years of betting horses (a once in five year strike rate).
In poker, I see bad beats all the time. Last month, I lost three times in one night with pocket pairs higher than another pocket pair (twice I had AA to QQ and once I had QQ to 99). All three times we were all in before the flop. All three times the lower pair tripped up. We all know that a higher pair is a prohibitive favorite over a lower pair, but that tripping up happens. For it to happen three times consecutively is a longshot but within the realm of consideration. One should definitely see such things if one plays enough.
Maybe the frequency of the bad beats should indicate that it is the expectations that are bad and not the beats.
While I will not go into my two worst bad beats (which were colossal), I will lay one memorable bad beat out for consideration and you consider how this compares to poker (I might have had myself to blame, and I certainly learned a lesson). I was betting a track I hadn\'t bet in years one night. It had been quite a busy day, and I wasn\'t able to as thoroughly scour information on the track as I would like to have. I noticed early on that the pick threes seemed to be very generous compared to the win prices of the horses (although there were no particularly long horses -- the pick three just seemed to offer unusual value), so I decided to concentrate my action on shotgunning pick threes. In one pick three with fields of more than 10 horses for all three races, I noticed that the races were particularly wide open, and I made my ticket wide open. I bet a $210 ticket (7X6X5X$1). Sure enough, long price horses came in all three legs -- $34, $98, and $46. The $1 win parlay would have paid $19,159 (and the parlay would have had a much more significant mutuel take withdrawn from it because the win take is performed three times as opposed to the one take in the pick three), guess what my ticket was worth! A mere $2,500. I just barely cleared 10-1 for hitting one of my best outcomes. What happened? I was not aware that the pools for the pick three at this track were tiny (and there was no way to get this information as there were no results for this track in the racing form and they did not post pool size). I had actually taken home the entire pool. My bet was more than 5% of the entire pool. I have now learned my lesson and am very careful about watching the size of pools before making my exotic bets, but this was an expensive lesson. How often can you expect to hit a bet like that? If I had made the bet in NY or California, I would have had a very nice score. As it turned out, my result for the night was ordinary. Again, maybe I was to blame in this situation, but it just shows that as a horseplayer, you face bad luck from a lot of unexpected sources. It also shows that bad beats are not things that happen a bunch of times in one year. They are watershed events in your gambling life. My two toughest bad beats are painful to recount.
One thing I forgot to add about my Pick three payoff bad beat, it occurred on a Friday night (which was this track\'s big night -- Garden State) and it involved the largest stakes race it offered that week. So, if there was a pool to be large at this track, it was that one.
Poker bots and collusion (mostly the latter) are something I was very concerned about when I started playing online. If I have been a victim of collusion, I haven\'t noticed it and it doesn\'t happen often enough to prevent me from winning. Supposedly the poker sites monitor the betting action and certain \"moves\" trigger red flags for review. They also look for certain players being on the same table too often as a \"suspect\" sign. It\'s in their best interests to keep things honest because they are making a fortune and any sign of collusion etc... could literally blow billions based on recent IPOs and profits etc...
I\'ll have to check, but you may have moved up in C\'s book with that one.
SoCalMan wrote,
\"Last month, I lost three times in one night with pocket pairs higher than another pocket pair (twice I had AA to QQ and once I had QQ to 99). All three times we were all in before the flop. All three times the lower pair tripped up. We all know that a higher pair is a prohibitive favorite over a lower pair, but that tripping up happens. For it to happen three times consecutively is a longshot but within the realm of consideration.\"
I have to say I have no interest in playing poker (although I like watching it on TV) -- but I am interested in how odds are figured. What you are describing does not sound like a longshot to me...
In this example, you say the higher pair is a prohibitive favorite in this situation and I would agree that this is how it is conventionally figured (the stupid thing would\'ve popped up on the screen and shown you as having a....75% chance or so of winning).
However, I think this is wrong because....aren\'t your odds of flipping another Ace EXACTLY THE SAME the other players odds of flipping another Queen? In other words, before the flop, there are two aces and two queens, so both of you have AN EQUAL CHANCE of getting trips (2-in-however many cards are left, right? Those odds are exactly the same...). So in reality, you are absolutely NOT a prohibitive favorite. The more accurate assessment would be...IF you hit your Ace you have a MUCH BETTER chance of winning...but your chances of getting the Ace are EXACTLY THE SAME as him getting his Queen.
I know this is a horse racing board, but this particular example was interesting.... I think you were unlucky, but you were not a \"prohibitive favorite\" going into the flop...regardless of what that stupid percentage calculator thing-y says...
HP
HP - What about if neither pair trips up? That significant chance gives the edge to the higher pair, because all else (between those two, anyway) is otherwise equal.
Of course that\'s true... I replied to this post because I just skimmed this article about aggressive playing in no-limit and the guy was saying there were a lot of situations where he HOPED the other guy had pocket Aces because pocket Aces may think his chances were better than they really were... I\'m probably paraphrasing this badly... HP
Okay, I\'ve been biting my tongue (ouch), but I have to say something because it\'s pretty obvious, and I don\'t think anyone else mentioned it.
While I haven\'t played a lot of hold\'em, I played an awful lot of high-low. The big difference between poker and betting races is the question of leverage. In most poker situations, the relationship between what you can win and lose on one bet is limited in scope-- especially in hold\'em, where most situations are heads-up plus some negligible antes (sp?). In horse racing, this is not true at all-- winning a photo can get you 5, 10, 30 times your money, and in the case of a pick six, who knows what.
This means there is an awful lot of randomness in our game, way more than in poker, where risk/reward is both limited and pretty quantifiable. When there is a carryover, it\'s random just which races will be part of the bet-- it might be that included is the race with the only winner you could not possibly have, or it might not. A couple of things like that can turn your whole year around, one way or the other.
Likewise, let\'s say you are involved in 10 coin flip situations in the course of a month-- photos, or calls which are 50/50 for the stewards, or for you in deciding whether to use a horse in exotics or not, or whether to play just tris or supers (#*^% BC Classic). Or to play at all. If in one month it goes your way 6 times, lose 4, the plus two might translate into 30 betting units. The same thing in poker will mean 2-3 units, either way.
Note-- the poker comments here apply only to regular games, not tournaments. There the leverage can be extreme.
Really, MY tough beats at the track or at the card table are the worst of all tough beats, and everybody else\'s tough beats really aren\'t that bad. And horse racing is better action than poker. There, I said it. HP
That is the type of thing Doyle Brunson says. What he means is, if there are a bunch of players in, and he has gone in with suited connectors (say 6-7 of hearts), then he hopes that the flop is something like A-4-5 with two of them being hearts. In this situation, he wants somebody to have made trip aces (and hopefully somebody else to be holding AK) because they believe they have the nut hand (and they are leading at that time). However, he has two chances to get one of 15 possible cards which will help him. If he does not get the magic card on fourth street, but he gets a 6 or a 7 (of which there are 6 left in the deck) he then gets 5 more cards to help him on the river (the other two of what came up plus the other three of what didn\'t). On the river, he might have 20 out of 44 cards to help him -- almost even money. There is a risk on fourth street that, instead of a 6 or 7, one of the A,4,or 5 came up at which point he is dead unless he has the 4,5,6,7 of hearts (in which case he has only 2 out cards). If there were a lot of players before the flop and then, after the flop, the AAs bet aggressively with the AK calling, then he knows if he makes his straight or flush chances are he will win a big pot which will overpay him for the risk he is taking (although there is a risk that the AK is also of hearts which is why he likes making the straight better). His theory is that he wants to win big pots and steal antes. The problems with high card hands (like AA and AK) is that they are obviously good hands and it can be hard to win big pots with them because so many people are afraid of them and yet they are vulnerable to being beaten by drawing hands in multiway play. The beauty of having low suited connectors is that people are not as afraid of them as they are of the big hands. If somebody has AA and trips up with them, they are not acting afraid, they are betting aggressively. When you have a chance at a monster hand, that is the type of opponent you need in order to get a truly big pot and that is why you might hope somebody has AA. Apologies if I somehow bastardized what Doylee meant, but I think I landed in the general vicinity.
I think you\'re right on the money, although I wasn\'t reading Doyle B. So my question is...do you still see yourself as such a monster favorite in those hands you lost? I would\'ve made you a ... slight favorite. HP
The correct way to play is to try to protect you top pair and made hands by betting enough to make the pot/implied odds too low for drawing hands to call against you. If they are stupid enough to call anyway, they WILL draw out and beat you sometimes but in the long term you will win money from them under that scenario. If they fold, you take down the pot right away.
High cards play better against fewer players.
Small suited connectors and small pocket pairs play better in multi-way pots because you won\'t hit the set, STR8 or flush that you need to win very often, but when you do you want the pot to be big to make the odds high enough to profit over the long haul. The huge hands win a very high percentage.
Pocket pairs will also play OK head ups.
You always know that an overpair can lose to a lower pair tripping up. In my case, there was extremely heavy betting before the flop on all three hands (this was no limit hold em), so chances were there were good hands out there. In all three cases, I ended up head to head against my opponent before the flop (i.e. all other players folded) with all our chips in the pot. The thing that is a long shot is that one player will lose in this situation three times in one night with the lower pair tripping up. I expect it to happen from time to time, but not three times in three hours. This is not as bad as a lot of horse racing beats, but it was bad enough that the third time I was head to head all in with somebdoy, the rest of the poker room stopped to watch the hand and people were talking abuot it the rest of the night. I was just in the same poker room today (a month later) and nobody mentioned it (and nobody even mentioned it the next week). It was a bad beat, but not colossal.
TGJB
This is a very good point. To illustrate it further, a poker bad beat is in some ways like a bridge jumper complaining that he suffered a bad beat. Maybe he was 98% likely to win and he was betting $10,000 to win $500. Maybe the bet made sense....in the long haul, he will profit. However, when the few times come in that he loses, can he fairly say he suffered a bad beat? I mean they go to the trouble of running the races for some reason, right? They go to the trouble of dealing a river card, right? It is called gambling, isn\'t it? Whenever there is a bridge jumping situation, I always look to see if there is a reason to think the horse might not run. I have cashed some huge show bets as a result (I recall my best was at Belmont one July. It was a sprint stakes, something like the True North. I think Richter Scale was a prohibitive favorite in a short field. There was obviously goign to be a huge negative show pool. I even forgot who I won with, but I had big show bet on a horse that paid something like $43.60 to show in the five horse field when Richter Scale ran out like it looked like he could -- it would have been one of those magical moments in the old days when you used to hear -- \"prices okay!\")
I realize the bridge jumper example might be an exaggeration, but what the poker bad beat guys are complaining about is when they are getting even money or 2 or maybe 3 to 1 when their chances of winning might be say 90%. Yes, they are getting a great bet, but in the few cases (10%) when the other guy wins, are they justified in complaining it is a bad beat? I mean if there is no chance for the other guy to win, there is no game at all. All games need a little bit of uncertainty to even exist, to then complain about that modicum of uncertainty seems a bit contradictory.
Granted, that modicum of uncertainty hitting at a bad time (WSOP or your shot at a million dollar pick six) can be very unfortunate, but this whole debate started with poker players (e.g. a Daily RACING Form Columnist) saying that poker bad beats are worse than horseracing bad beats. In the end, I do not know if I even want to win such an argument. I mean what do you win for it? Nothing! The knowledge that you are a bigger loser?
But, recall the title of this thread -- Pissed at Crist. This whole thing started because a poker column in the horseracing newspaper had the temerity to tell the horseplaying audience that their bad beats aren\'t really bad beats and that poker players have it much worse. Has anybody read Fornatale\'s column? I mean what did the horseplaying public do to deserve this assault in the Daily Racing Form. It would be one thing if these columns actually wrote about poker and helped people\'s games, but these columns are embarrassing and not up to the standards we should expect in the DRF. The first three can be summarized easily -- don\'t go on tilt after a bad beat (and in Fornatale\'s case, \"to all you horseplayers, you do not know what a bad beat is anyway, so it really shouldn\'t trouble you anyway\").
Richibee,
Did you ever think your digust with drf as to their decision to print a column on poker would cause such a bevy of conversation??
And its not even remotely related to your message!...Then again I think it shows the devoted horse player just how popular and profitable poker can be to those of us that have been gambling for decades.
The poker folks treat us square...don\'t gouge..don\'t make up the rules as they go along...no trainers or owners or jockeys to steer you off course.
With that said ...its still not anything like the ponies.
The world is going to hell in a hand basket. Poker reviews in the DRF written by none other than Kurt Paseka.
Last seen running nude through the Saratoga infield after losing a bet.
What\'s Next.
REMEMBER PREAKNESS DAY!!! How could I ever forget...my husband and I both handicapped the race and came to the conclusion that Artax could not only be beaten, but actually might run out of the money. We also both loved the Lukas horse (Yes It\'s True @ 5 to 1) - an even greater rarity...our agreement that is!
He keyed Yes It\'s True in rolling Pick 3\'s, and I played the winner on top of Pat Day\'s horse (who ran second at 10-1) in exacta\'s and tri\'s. The bad beat for us was when they declared Artax a non-starter and took him and his money out of the race. The trifecta pool was at $1.2 million before $800,000 was removed for bets associated with Artax. The Pick 3\'s were just as devastating as the projected payoff of some $200 or $300 fell to only $35 in that race, and suffered accordingly in the following two races.
I used to think that losing the entire tri pool at Calder the day Wiorno was dq\'ed from 1st to 3rd in the Rothman\'s was my worst bad beat experience. However, seeing Artax running 4th and backing up before that crazy man ever set foot on the racetrack made the decision of the Maryland track stewards rise to the top of my \"hit\" list!
By the way, my husband\'s worst bad beat in poker was going all in with pocket kings and losing to Alex Solis who caught 3 of a kind on the flop...in a charity tournament won by Alex in the next round!
uh hemmmm..............(With big smile on my face)
Thank you.
D-Rex:
No, I am not happy about my small role in converting this bulletin board into a \"too much poker most of the time\" discussion space.
As I have explained in the past, I am a compulsive horseplayer who enjoys worshipping at no other temple. I\'ve been to casinos twice and was bored to tears after 15 minutes both times. My feelings about betting sports such as football were expressed in a post to the erstwhile Jimbo, who I fear may have been kidnapped by the Raggies.
My most pleasant experience with poker was in college, where I had a girlfriend who enjoyed an occasional game of one on one strip poker. THAT relationship ended a few days after my 24th birthday. She told me \"Its your birthday, we can do whatever you want.\" \"Whatever I wanted\" was a trip to Belmont Park, where I placed a rather large win bet on the great mare Pearl Necklace, who was nailed on the wire by the aptly named Late Bloomer.
Will be playing the races on the inner tube today. Note with interest that all the entrants in the finale are trained by trainers with a win percentage of less than 10. A \"stuportrainer\" special.
D- Rex I have one question: What happened to the \"Party Poker ON\" tag on your posts? Did they stop sending you checks, or did you get a cease and desist order from their attorneys?
Rich,
Your post brings back memories about the Pearl Necklace - Late Bloomer race. I remember it was a source of heated discussion amongst my friends whether her slight stumble at the start cost her the nose she was nipped by.
Boy, that takes me back.
Bob
Richiebee,
When a rag like drf starts up a column on poker,its time to sell all your stock.
Presently collecting new words of wisdom to end my satorical tirades.
I\'ll keep an open mind even though I\'m not too sure they weren\'t pushing it a little bit with the football stuff but ok I understand \'I Played the game ... where else could they be going with this but only to protect and expand their market share is my best guess .
Ugh! Thanks for reviving that memory. Wiorno was a horrible DQ.