Dougie Nutz

Paul Phillips posts the following problems on his livejournal: My answers are interspersed. Now keep in mind that I am just beginning to learn how to play no-limit and do not play tournaments (except for sit-n-go's wicks are a different animal altogether) so I would be surprised if I got one of these right.

I know I'm failing to include any detail about these players but it's enough to go on that they were all amateurs who had demonstrated the ability to make significant mistakes.

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Level 2, 50-100: I have 9500. Mid-position limper, I limp in the cutoff. Button makes it 600, first limper calls. I make it 2100, both other players call. Flop is 864 with two diamonds. Check, check, button bets 4000. First guy drops and I check-raise all-in for about 3000 more. The button has me covered with another 3000 or so to spare. What do I have? What should the button call with? What should he lay down?

Preflop limp reraise. I would put you on a pair or AK suited. If the other limper had folded, you might have a smaller pair, but with a player in between, you probably have a big pair AA-QQ. When you check raise on the flop you are hoping to get the button all in which means you think you are ahead. You would be ahead of most hands with a big pair or AK diamonds but your margin with AK is pretty slim. I don't think you want to get all in on a coin flip at this stage of the tournament so I narrow your hand down to AA-QQ.

Your opponent has to call 3000 to win a pot that has 17450 in it. Very close to 6:1 odds. He needs 7 outs to call. He could call with hands as low as a pair and a gut shot :78, 89 but how he would have gotten here with that hand is beyond me. I think that he only calls with AA-QQ. Of course it is going to be very tough to lay down AK or JJ-99 but the fact that you are just not in the mood to gamble with coinflips this early in the tournament should scare him off of those.

Level 3, 75-150: I have 15K at a new table. Folded to me on the button and I make it 550. The big blind, who has me covered by roughly 1000, re-raises to 2500. I re-raise to 6000. What do I have? What hands should he call or jam with?

This is tougher. You opened from the button. You could have just about anything at this point. He pops from the big blind. He could have just about anything also. You re-raise to almost half your stack. Are you bluffing? Highly unlikely. Again, this is first day and you are not looking to stick your neck out there. So you probably have a pocket pair. Not a great one or you would have given this guy a chance to bet at the flop. I would say TT-66. He should jam with any Ax Broadway (AK-AT). Maybe he should jam with hands as weak as KC. He should call with pocket pairs AA-TT.

Level 5, 100-200/25: I have 30K. There are two limpers and I make it 1200 in late position. Only the second limper calls, and he only has about 6000 remaining. The flop comes AJ6 rainbow. He checks and I check. The turn is an 8. Now he moves all-in and I call instantly. What does he have? What should I have called him with?

I don't see limping with a good ace at this point and there is never any reason to just call with a bad ace. If he has an ace I will eat my hat. He's got a mediocre jack or worse. You call with a pair of aces or a JT or better.

Then there is this hand from day two, which may have been the key hand of the tournament for me until the very late stages for reasons that should become apparent later. The big blind was a conscious player but UTG had made several questionable plays.

Level 8, 300-600/75: I have 60K. UTG (100K) limps and I call in the small blind. The big blind (12K) raps and the flop comes 863 with two spades. We check to UTG who bets 3K. I call and the big blind mini-check-raises to 6K. Now UTG mini-re-raises to 12K. After long consideration I call, and the big blind calls all-in. What does everyone have? The turn is an offsuit king. I check. I ask again, what does everyone have? UTG checks. The river is the 3 of spades. I bet 10K into the 40K pot. What do I have? UTG quickly calls. What does he have?

I concede defeat on this one. Small blind, big blind you guys could have anything. After that, I think you are just making it up. OK, OK just to say that I gave it a try. BB has two pair. UTG has a flush and you have a set for the full house.

Paul Phillips posts in his livejournal about a hand between him and Jennifer Harmon.

Jennifer Harman is constantly raising my blind from late position. She has about 130K, I have about 180K. Par at this point is maybe 60K so we both have large stacks. I call her 4500 raise in the big blind with TT. The flop comes T92. I bet 9000 and she raises to 29000, leaving her with 94K. I move it all-in and she finds a way to lay down aces. Looked at from one perspective this is an egregious waste of a 10-1 favorite, but instead I'll give her credit for a monster laydown... one she might easily not have made.

Laying down aces is always a tough move, especially against a tricky aggressive player like Paul. But this situation is an example of something that I have been thinking about lately while trying to learn how to play no-limit hold'em.

It is common wisdom in no limit Hold'em that you can call preflop with a small pair even if you are absolutely certain that your opponent has an overpair. However, since you are about 7.5:1 to flop a set, in order to make this a good call, you have to believe that you can get almost 10 times the preflop call from the betting after the flop. If you or your opponent don't have that much money left it is a bad call.

The converse of this would seem to be, if you raise with aces preflop, you really don't want to put more than 10 times that raise in the pot after the flop. There are a few ways to accomplish this. 1) You can do your best to put in at least 10% of your stack (or your opponent's stack) before the flop. 2) You can play Aces carefully after the flop. I think that both of these are a good idea. 3) You can fold if the amount of betting exceeds 10 times your pre-flop bet. That is pretty tricky. It is very tough to fold an overpair, especially with a non-threatening flop. I don't like that option at all.

But if you add it up, Jennifer raised to 4500 preflop, she reraised to 29000 on the flop and let it go when it got higher than that. Hmm, letting it go when the bet reaches 10 times your pre-flop bet. There might be something to that.

Update: The actual odds of flopping a set or better are 7.5:1 not 10:1 as I originally stated. Thanks to Burningyen for pointing this out. I think that you generally want to be getting 10:1 rather than 7.5:1 to account for the times that you wind up getting beaten anyway or are wrong about your read.

Multi-tabling is one of the best aspects of online poker. When you play four tables at once you are almost always making decisions and you are quite often involved in at least one hand. Poker goes from being a game of waiting, waiting, waiting to fast and fun (without having to sacrifice your calling standards). But one problem for me at least is that when I am playing 4 tables at one time I can't really keep track of all of the players on all of the tables, how they are playing and how I should play against them. I'll be lucky to identify one or two really fishy players and key off of them. Even then I have had times when I have gotten a raise from the number two seat and reraised because he is a loose aggressive player and I have a good enough hand (AJ) that is likely to be ahead. I play out the hand only to realize on the turn that the loose aggressive player in the two seat left a couple of rotations ago and this new guy is a shark. HAH!

So if you are going to multi-table, I would highly recommend some kind of tracking software. Poker tracker is the number one choice for a tracking database. You just set it up and while you are playing games and for most sites it finds the hand histories and sucks the results into a complete hand history database. You can go through the hands later at your leisure and analyze your results as well as the play of your opponents. It's like having the ultimate set of notes on everybody you play against. This is a great way to pick up leaks in your game and about the only way to figure out how everyone is playing at 4 tables getting 100 hands an hour.

But pokertracker's built in tools for tracking the play while at the tables are clunky at best. You really need to use a heads up display. The heads up displays actually project player's statistics on the table while you are playing. Gametime plus was one of the first heads up displays I ever used. PlayerView has a little bit nicer interface and it automatically recognizes tables you have open (you have to do this manually with Gametime plus). But it is a little bit pricey at $50. Currently I am trying out PokerAce and I like it a lot.

Combine pokertracker and a heads up display and you can have the fast and furious action that comes with multi-tabling while still retaining a significant edge over your opponents.

My wife hates it when I play poker. She seems to take it as a personal insult that I am not spending time with her. I understand her point. I do my best to set aside several nights a week to spending time together. But sometimes I get the impression that she expects me to spend all of my free time staring longingly into her eyes. I think it is healthy to spend some time alone pursuing our own hobbies. But we'll see. Right now there is a lot of pressure on me to quit.

If anyone out there knows of a San Diego Poker Widows group, I'm sure she would love to join. It may not take any of the pressure off of me, but I'm sure she would love a forum to air her greivences.

I play poker. A little bit more than I should. If I was a losing player this would be a sad, sad story but... so far, I am a winning poker player. I play 15/30 limit and $50 sit-n-go's online, on a Party Poker skin. Sometimes I play higher when the games are good and of course I drop down when the games are bad. I am also trying to learn how to play no-limit holdem well. I usually play $100 or $200 max buy-in no limit games on party, but I am just beginning to learn how to play.

I don't make enough to quit my day job and I'm not sure if I would quit even if I did make a good $150-$200K. But it is a fun hobby and a hell of a lot cheaper than golf.

Nicknames are organic. They arise by chance, often in response to some embarrassing event that the bearer would rather forget. There was a guy in my fraternity called "Meat". He was a big guy, a varsity heavyweight wrestler, about 6'5" and 260 pounds of meat. He was also hard as nails. Known for taking on guys even bigger than him, sometimes more than one at a time, in street brawls and barroom fights and laying them out cold. Meat. That's what their faces looked like after they tangled with him. Meat...

It turns out that Meat was short for Meathead. As a pledge, he was famous for not being able to memorize any of the fraternity information (founding dates, famous alumni, etc) and quickly earned the nickname, Meathead. Naturally, he didn't like it, and you don't call a guy that big Meathead for long. So it got shortened to Meat.

I wonder if some of the poker players nicknames are like that. Maybe Thomas "Thunder" Keller got that name because he has really loud farts. Is Michael "The Grinder" Misrachi happy with that handle? I usually hear grinder used as a derogatory term, meaning a tight unimaginative player. And who would have ever thought that a hard charging Texas road gambler would be known as "Dolly"?

Of course some names are openly derogatory, if not apt. Mike "The Mouth" Matasow. Phil "Poker Brat" Hellmuth.

So how did I come across the nickname "Dougie Nutz"? I started playing poker in Minneapolis, before they opened the Canterbury Park card club. I played every Friday in a game that was run out of a hotel. It was a pretty small group of regular players and I got to know a lot of those guys pretty well. They were a great group of guys and I am lucky that my first experience in poker included their honest camaraderie rather than being restricted to a cold, impersonal casino with a bunch of people I didn't know. However, they had absolutely no imagination when it came to nicknames. There was a dentist in the game called... wait for it... "Doc". Although I never met him, they talked a lot about a guy with a glass eye, "Deadeye". So when I told them I worked for the University, they immediately dubbed me "The Professor". One thing I've learned about nicknames, is, when saddled with a bad one, the last thing you want to do is tell people you hate it. That's one way to make sure that it sticks. So I grinned, "isn't that one already taken?" "Yeah but he doesn't play here."

Now let me explain one thing. When I first started out I had a reputation as a very tight player. In limit, ring games that is the worst reputation to have. The only advantage of a tight reputation in limit ring games is that it will allow you to steal the blinds every now and then. Now if you find yourself in a game where you can steal the blinds more than once every 50 hands or so... leave. There are better games out there, play in one of them. The disadvantage of having a tight reputation when you are in fact a tight player is that people often know what you have and they can make your life miserable by taking shots at the pot when rags flop. "The Professor" just screams tight, unimaginative, "book" player, which is exactly what I was, which is part of the reason why I didn't want the nickname.

When Canterbury opened up, my poker world expanded exponentially but I still saw those guys a lot. The other players at the table would pick up on the professor label pretty quickly. Faced with the prospect of having "The Professor" called out every time I sat down at a table or won a pot, I decided to take proactive action.

Having spent 5 years in a fraternity with a name like "Hershberger" you can imagine that I had more than one nickname to fall back on. Actually, the problem was not a lack of nicknames it was that I had too many of them. Hamburger, Furburger, Muffurger, Hershey Highway, Flounder, Dougie Fresh. Eventually the guys were so confused what to call me that they just called me Dougie ______. Fill in the blank, it doesn't really matter.

Dougie _____ stuck with me all through college. I went to the Bahamas for spring break, I was Dougie Beach, Dougie Waves, Dougie Reggae, and Dougie Stoned (lots of rocks in the Bahamas apparently). Pretty soon, it got out of hand, Dougie Darts, Dougie 9 Ball, Dougie Palms, Dougie Gorge. For every significant incident (or more often, accident) in my life there was somebody who would forever remember me and my nickname in that context.

So I graduated with the unlikely, amorphous nickname, Dougie ______. It has stayed with me ever since. The guys at the Friday game were all excited for the opening of Canterbury. One of the main topics of discussion was "what your board name would be." Doc was happy to keep his. A few others came up with names we'd never heard before. Everybody agreed that I should stick with "The Professor". Meanwhile, I secretly plotted a revolt.

Dougie _____? Dougie What? Dougie Poker? Naw, too obvious. Dougie Shark? SHUT UP! Dougie Holdem? Needs work. Finally I settled on Dougie Nutz. It rolls off the tongue and has that strong means weak feel that I was going for.

The first time I stepped up to the board at Canterbury, there was a mob of asian gentlemen trying to secure a seat. Patiently, I awaited my turn. Then rather impatiently. Then after a while it became obvious that people who had arrived 20 minutes after me were already on the board and I was still trying to get some attention. The lady at the board, finally turned to me. "Whatta you want?"

I hesitated, I was planning on playing 6/12 Holdem but the crowd was starting to get to me... "4/8 holdem", I shouted.

"What's the name?" She shot back.

"Dougie Nutz." I yelled.

"What!?!"

Uh oh. Maybe I had said something wrong. Maybe this lady was going to bar me from the casino for lewd speech. Maybe state cops were right now being summoned to the Canterbury park gates.

I threw caution to the wind. "Dou-gie Nu-uttz." I enunciated. She stopped, thought for a while, and scratched her head.

"Dougie Nutz?" She asked. I nodded. "Welcome to Canterbury, Dougie Nutz." She said with a great big grin.

After a while I found out that the lady at the board was Annie Adlin, a consummate professional, she put everyone at ease just by walking next to the table. She was one of the poker room managers at Canterbury.

And from then on, whenever I walked into the room, the girls at the board practically squealed. "Dougie Nutz!" Whenever I came up for a table, if Annie was anywhere near the board she would growl into the microphone, in a soft, sexy tone, "Dougie Nutz.., 4/8 Holdem? ... Yes? ... Lock it up for ... Dougie Nutz."

I felt like I'd found my Home.