Pissed at Crist

[davidrex]

Lets not leave out Remington Park

[NoCarolinaTony]

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

[Mall]

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.    

[TGJB]

My only contribution to this string is that Andres Serrano would love it, and Guliani would hate it.

I\'m just saying.

[bobphilo]

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

[asfufh]

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 ?

[Boscar Obarra]

  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.

[SoCalMan2]

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.  

[davidrex]

 


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.

[Mall]

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.  

[SoCalMan2]

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.  

[Mall]

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.    

[SoCalMan2]

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.