Tommy Angelo

It was at a $2-5 blinds no-limit hold’em game in Vegas. The waitress came by. Several players ordered adult beverages. I was in seat one and the waitress was standing behind seat five, so it was well heard when I said to her, “I’d like a glass of milk please.” There were a couple subtle chortles.

When my milk arrived, the player next to me, who was gone from the table when I ordered, asked me what it was.

“Milk,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “I thought maybe it was some sort of coconut concoction.”

“Nope, just milk.”

Ten minutes later, I had 7-5 on the button. One player limped. I limped. The small blind completed, and the big blind checked. Four players. I had the smallest stack with $500.

The flop was 9-5-5 rainbow. The three of them checked, and somewhere in my mind I think I was thinking of the verb version of my drink, so I checked too.

The turn was a ten, putting two hearts on board. The small blind bet $25. The next two players folded. I called. Headsup now.

The river was the ace of hearts. The small blind bet $40. I called.

“I have an ace,” he said, and I turned over my hand.

At that moment, one of the chatty players who had been paying attention to this hand said to me, “What’s your name friend?”

“Milk,” I said, deadpan.

That was very well received, and my name was Milk for the night.

(This blog post is an article that is in the October 2008 issue of BLUFF Magazine.)

The Butoff

Words lag behind what they label. For example, the blogosphere was well past infancy before the word “blogosphere” existed. Bad beats were around long before the term “bad beat” was. And “the universe” was here for billions of years before it got its name. So it’s no surprise, given how fast poker is changing and growing, that we are always running behind. That’s why I have taken it upon my magnanimous self, in the spirit of public service, to help us stay caught up, by making up words (or reassigning them) when I notice one is missing.

Most of the words I come up with are like defective genes; they don’t get passed along. Now and then, I coin one that spreads, such as The Hijack seat. And I’m the guy who redeployed the words Twotone and Monotone to refer to non-rainbow flops. Some other children of mine that are surviving in the wild are Table Poker (non-internet poker), Sixth Street (the action after the hand is over), Mum Poker (it’s just what it sounds like), Game Rejection (a form of quitting), Reciprocality (the cause of profit at poker), and Bliscipline (bliss caused by discipline – or is it the other way around?).

And now, I give you: the butoff seat.

There’s a very big difference between butoff and all the other words I have made up in that I didn’t make it up. It came to me. I mean that literally. It came to me in an email from Matts Quiding. All I did was recognize the glorious potential contained within a typo. Here’s the pertinent part from Matts’ email. He was asking me about a betting situation in Limit Hold’em, and I quote:

Hand 9
Betfair – 4-handed
I have 10h-8h in the BB. Very loose cannon who now seems to be raising every hand opens from butoff. Loose-aggressive who realizes this three-bets on the button, SB folds. I’m in the BB. My play here? My calling range for situation?

I saw “butoff” and I did an internal happy dance, which is typically followed by an urge to write to everyone I know and exclaim that I have yet again come across the coolest thing ever. See, I knew instantly what “butoff” meant, what it had always meant, what it was meant to mean. I knew what it was that existed before the word, and now, there was the word, and it was good.

Butoff: A pre-flop position that arises at table poker when the player in the cutoff seat looks left and sees that the button is going to fold. The player in the cutoff will now be last to act for the entire hand and he knows it, even though he doesn’t actually have the button. His position is the butoff. (The abbreviation for the butoff is BO, which fits nicely, as it should, between the abbreviations for the cutoff and the button, thus: CO – BO – BN.)

These are some of the major milestones that have shaped my life: 1) The big bang happened. 2) The solar system happened. 3) Led Zeppelin happened. 4) I happened to notice that the best seat in the house is the one to the right of a tight player who reliably telegraphs his pre-flop action.

So I started moving to the right of guys like that – and looking left a lot – which effectively gave me the button about one and a half times per round. Looking left is huge because when it makes a difference, it makes a huge difference. When I’m in the cutoff and the button gives me the button by indicating that he is folding, I might call when I would have otherwise raised, I might raise when I would have called, I might call instead of folding, and I might raise instead of folding. Those are the biggest strategy alterations possible! Caused entirely by a look left.

You don’t have to believe, like I do, that looking left is in itself totally awesome. The way to think of it is like this: Would it be more profitable for you to not look left? If you think the answer is no, then that means you think that looking left is at worst a freeroll. And if you’re any kind of gambler, you’re supposed to love freerolls.

Okay, for all I know, you might think this is the dumbest idea since nearly-sliced bread (like they serve in restaurants these days). The butoff seat might die right here, right now, and never get reproduced in our meme pool. So be it. All I know is that if you’re sitting on my left and you have the button, and I look over and see that you are about to fold, I know what I’ll be thinking – butt off!

When my dad died in 1996, there was one uproarious moment during the formal mourning period, a story that has been told and retold, tilled and retooled.

First came the evening wake at the funeral home, a highly populated event. The next day there was the funeral at the massive Catholic church with aisles filled. It was our parish church. My siblings and I all went to the grade school next to it. The next day was the burial, a ceremony that began at the church. The immediate family had a final viewing of the body, then we went out the side door of the church to get in a hearse that would lead a procession of cars to the graveyard. There were many emotional spikes during these days, and for me, there were two major ones on this day. One was during the final viewings. The other was the uproarious moment I’m working toward.

My mom died in 1986. Four years later, my dad married an angel. Her name is Jackie. The immediate family that was in the hearse was me, my three siblings — Jude, David, and Paul — Jude’s 16-year-old daughter Josephine, and
Jackie.

The graveyard was several miles due north from the church. But we didn’t take the shortest route. Instead, because of David’s brilliant idea, the caravan went south and west, about a mile, to the fabled Horseshoe Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University, where my dad taught for 31 years without ever missing one day. And he went to every home football game. And he used to play handball with Woody Hayes. People around here like to say “I bleed Scarlet and Grey.” Buckeye fans remind me a little of how poker players can all think they are better than everyone else. I’ve seen Buckeye fans enraged over who is the more maniacally devoted fan. But they’re just fans. They don’t live right next to campus and spend most of their days on it every year for a lifetime. I never saw my dad with an open wound. I can’t help but wonder though, just what color his blood really was.

So this huge trail of cars went down to the stadium and lapped it. It was the right thing to do. No doubt that just like the rest of us, the stadium wanted to say goodbye to Ralph.

Back on High Street, heading north, the mood in the hearse was light. Ups and downs are really just two sides of one coin, I began to notice during this time. We’re driving along, and Josephine said something that was incorrect. I can’t recall what it was. I can’t even recall what kind of error she made. It could have been something grammatical, since that is one of the types of things that people in my family are in the habit of correcting. Or it could have been something stated as a fact that wasn’t. Whatever it was, she said something that was incorrect, and my brother David quickly corrected her.

And Paul said to David, “So who died and put you in charge?”

We laughed and laughed and cried and laughed and did it some more.

Have you ever played a hand so bad that you just can’t let it go? During the session you keep thinking about it. The next day you keep thinking about it. It’s like a festering infection. It’s like the first time somebody put those trick candles in your birthday cake. You blow out the flames, but then they just keep popping back up. At first it’s freaky, and annoying, and everyone is laughing, but I’m not having fun. Playing a hand bad and having it keep coming back in my mind is just like that, except it’s the entire universe laughing at me, and it’s definitely not fun. That’s why, ever since my fifth birthday, I have dedicated my life to gaining the ability to stop the taunting, and I’m pretty far along, but I’m not all the way cured. There are times, like when I totally butcher 72o, a hand that I have misplayed many times, when the coming back keeps comes back.

Like this one time, in Vegas. I was playing in a full $5-10 blinds no-limit hold’em game at The Venetian. Two players folded, and the next player opened for $30. This guy was as reliable as a coin flip. Heads he folds, tails he plays. Yes, he liked to see lots of flops, and yes, his hand range here was very wide, but he was by no means what I would call a donator. He did not get strung out for big money before the flop, or after it, without good cause. Even though he gave himself plenty of rope, he almost never hung himself with it.

Two players called behind him, and the small blind folded. I was in the big blind, and despite having 7-2 offsuit, I folded.

Do I suck or what? My image at the time was very tight, very disciplined, very much like the kind of guy who, if he were to raise from the big blind in this spot, to say, $150, the chances that anyone would call would be dang near zero. That was me. That was who I was at that moment. I was a guy who was looking at one hundred and five dollars sitting in the middle of the table as if it was just sitting there on a sidewalk, and I neglected to pick it up.

Okay, thanks for listening to my bad play story. I think I can let that hand go now.

[This post is still growing, and it will very likely appear in BLUFF Magazine after it matures.]

I was walking through town just now, pretending I had superpowers. It was the coolest thing. I made believe I had this thing called a body, which was basically a self-propelled, self-operated sensory array. The main piece was on top. It was like this orb stuck to the end of a twist-o-flex segmented cable-holding rod thing. The orb had one big hole in the middle, and several pairs of holes, where the magical information would go in. See, the way I was making it up, and I know this is kind of crazy, but there were these weird invisible rays that were basically everywhere, moving around, and they would bounce off anything they came across, and then they’d carry some sort of residual images of objects around. Now, these rays didn’t actually do anything, unless they happened to go through these two tiny holes in the orb that stuck out of the top of my body thing. Oh, I meant to tell you, I wasn’t the only orb toter. Because of the magical information rays and my superpower, I could tell that there were other bodies with orbs and ray holes around me.

Another superpower I gave myself used two of the other holes. They let in a different type of information altogether. It was like, invisible vibrations, that got more intense sometimes, and less sometimes, and they came out of things, and they seemed to sometimes have an upness and downness to them.

And the most tripped out thing I imaged I had was this super flex-o-stretch sheathing of sensing cells that covered my entire body. It allowed me to know, for example, when I came into contact with anything, such as objects, and also I could tell when the stuff that the vibrations moved through was moving.

The first time I got a byline for writing a poker article for a print magazine, Bill Clinton was president. The magazine was Poker Digest. A couple years later, Poker Digest ceased to be, and I haven’t been in print since. Until now. In the September 2008 issue of Bluff Magazine that just came out, you can find the last two pages of my book on page 114. The excerpt is called “A Process of Illumination.”

But it’s nothing new, I mean, it’s not new to me. I wrote it a year ago. And lots of people have read it before it appeared in Bluff. What is new, I mean really new, is the stuff I wrote this morning. Words and ideas that I now get to watch every day as they grow, and shift, and bud-off, and die-off, and mutate into something that wants to be a cohesive whole, but won’t be until I send it to my editor Anna, and then she’ll send me back all sorts of wonderful suggestions using track-changes, and then we’ll talk on the phone, and then I’ll go back into the file and add stuff and remove stuff and change stuff, and I’ll print it out and carry it around with me for a few days while I make little marks on it with my red pen, and then I’ll enter those changes into the file, and then I’ll send it to my buddy Alex, and he’ll tell me which parts totally suck, and then I’ll fix that stuff, and then I’ll read it out loud to my wife, and she’ll say just send it in already, and then I’ll send it to a man I am so very pleased to now know and call a friend — we’ve had a couple very long lunches in Vegas, his name is Matthew Parvis and he’s the editor-in-chief of Bluff Magazine — and after he sees it, he might write back and say something like holy cow man, what’s with the run-ons? which I’ll try to explain away as nothing more than caffeine art, and he’ll probably say okay whatever, I’m printing it, your check’s in the mail, and I’ll be like, oh … my … god, I do so love ink.

My first new-article-in-progress for Bluff Magazine is currently titled, “My under-over line at no-limit.” It’s about certain situations where I drastically underbet the pot on one street followed by a drastic overbet on the next street. I’ll let you know how it turns out. :-)

The other day I was in a conversation with an old friend, and some new acquaintances who I would most likely never see again. We were jawing away about rock and roll. Twice I tossed out bits of pertinent trivia, and twice I was quickly told by one of the acquaintances that I was wrong. Both times I knew I was right, and both times I backed off immediately.

The next day I was walking with my friend. He had done some research since the day before. “You were right. Joni Mitchell did write the song ‘Woodstock,’ and Bill Bruford did drum for Genesis on their first post-Gabriel tour.”

“Yup.”

“So why didn’t you call that asshole out yesterday when he said you were wrong the only two times you even said anything? You’re always avoiding conflict. You should show some balls when you know you’re right.”

“Okay, as a favor to you, I’ll give you some conflict. You’re wrong.”

“That’s more like it! [laughing] Please hammer me some more!”

“I don’t avoid conflict. Actually what I do is just the opposite. Avoiding conflict is easy. What I do is much harder. I end it.”

“Oh please do explain.”

“Avoiding conflict is what a bullfighter does. He sees the conflict coming, and he moves out of the way. If a bullfighter were to stand still, and face the bull as the bull charges, and allow himself to be impaled and killed, that would be ending the conflict. When a person charges at me with words and ideas that are in conflict with mine, I just stand there. But it’s different than bullfighting in that words and thoughts don’t draw blood, so when I end a conflict, nobody gets hurt.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

I was had.

My friend Jack is from China. When he speaks English, he does so with a very heavy accent, and his word selection has on occasion caused me to reach for my pen to capture the moment. Like this one time…

We were playing shorthanded $40-80 limit hold’em in the middle of the night. A hand came up where I raised before the flop, and I raised on the flop. On the turn, it was headsup, me and Jack. Jack bet the turn and I called. On the river, Jack bet and I folded. Jack showed his cards. He had a very strong hand.

A little while later, the same thing happened. Jack and I played a pot, and on the river, Jack bet and I folded. Again he showed a good hand.

Soon after that, Jack raised from under-the-gun, and everyone folded around to me in the big blind. I folded. Jack showed pocket kings. What he intended to say to me was something that meant “You have a good nose for sensing when I have a good hand.”

What he actually said was, “You smell good.”

Here’s a decision I made in the $10-10-20 no-limit hold’em game at Lucky Chances in the spring, when the minimum buy-in was $2,000. The lineup — what we lovingly call The Breakfast Club — was playing tight and tough, as it so often does. Inevitably, the cards slice deep cuts into some of the stacks, which causes blood to flow, and that gets the chips moving, sometimes, depending on whose nuts get cracked.

When this hand came up, the game was two hours old, and there had been no major wounds. The two biggest pots of the day had been in the $1000-2000 range, and neither of them went to showdown. On this hand, I was under the gun. I opened for $80 and only the button called. The pot was $190. On the flop, I bet $200 and he called. On the turn, I bet $500 and he called. At this point the pot was about $1600. On the river, I checked, and he went all-in for $1600. (I had him covered.)

At this point, his hand was polarized. I knew he either had me beat, or he didn’t. If I called, I would be getting 2-1 on my money which meant that if he had me beat twice as often as he didn’t, then it didn’t matter what I did. And as best as I could figure it, within the image of reality that exists only in my mind, which happens to be the only version of reality I have access to, that was how it was: the EV of calling was the same as the EV of folding.

So, what to do?

Well, that’s an easy one: move to an outer shell of parameters and weigh the decision from there.

My opponent was a player who often plays pretty snug for long stretches, and then, when he plays a big all-in pot, he will sometimes play somewhere between reckless and rukus for a while. And it doesn’t matter if he wins the big pot or loses it. He tends to get spunky either way. And when the spunkiness comes over him, his spunk can cause a few others to spunk it up, and now we’ve got a game. And let’s just say for the sake of parameter thinning that I thought I could rely on myself to be equally steady, win or lose. So now we have determined that after looking at the meta-game, the decision was simple.  Call and maybe rev up the game, or fold and keep it the same.

I asked myself: Do I feel like playing? And what kind of game do I feel like playing in? My choices were:

Fold and continue playing in a tough-tight game. (I like tough-tight games during those times when I like that kind of game. It just depends.)

Fold and quit a tough-tight game. (Never a bad idea.)

Call and play in a loose-ish game ahead $2400. (Sometimes I keep playing because I’m ahead, and independent of that, sometimes I keep playing because the game got looser.)

Call and quit a loose-ish game stuck $2400. (Sometimes I quit because I’m stuck, and independent of that, sometimes I quit because the game got looser.)

This was a difficult decision for me at the time, and I took way longer than usual on it.  And then a big grin crept over me inside when I realized that the reason I couldn’t attach to one of the options was because I was unattached to all of them. So I pulled out my most trusted scale tipper, my protector, my net. Remember when I said I thought I could count on myself to stay steady if I called this hand, win or lose? Well, that’s not actually true. Usually I can. But sometimes I can’t. And I never really know for sure which way it’s going to be. And even when I am perfectly unflustered by a big pot, it nonetheless increases the probability a little bit that the next big pot might knock me off balance.

I decided to let the first blood spill on someone else’s hand. I decided to wait for a +EV spot to play an all-in pot. And I realized I liked this tough-tight game right now, just the way it is. So I folded and posted my blind.