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Ed. note: For those who might have missed it before, we're reprising Robert Woolley's series of articles for poker players who are new to live poker. The series is great for newcomers, and likely useful as well to those with experience playing in casinos and poker rooms.
'The guy who invented gambling was bright, but the guy who invented the chip was a genius.'
That pithy sentence is usually attributed to Julius 'Big Jules' Weintraub, a big gambler who essentially invented the 'Vegas junket' for East Coast residents, though I have not been able to identify a reliable primary source for this quotation. Whoever said it was right — you can play poker with cash, but chips make the game far easier to manage.
Because chips are such a ubiquitous feature of poker, it's easy to accept their presence without much thought. But I think there's a lot that's worth knowing about poker chips before you sit down at a table full of them.
Chips and Money (A Complicated Relationship)
The first thing to understand is that chips are real money, just in a different form. This truth is simultaneously obvious and elusive. Weintraub's observation gets at how easy it is to forget it and to start treating chips as mere abstractions.
In The Biggest Game in Town — one of the most articulate and influential books ever written about poker — Al Alvarez mused, 'The chip is like a conjurer's sleight of hand that turns an egg into a billiard ball, a necessity of life into a plaything, reality into illusion. Players who freeze up at the sight of a fifty-dollar bill, thinking it could buy them a week's food at the supermarket, will toss two green [$25] chips into the pot without even hesitating if the odds are right.'
Successful poker players rely on their weaker opponents losing touch with the equivalence of poker-world chips and real-world money. As for their own relationship with that truth, however, strong players both remember and disregard it.
That is, you must keep in mind that playing badly and as a result losing $100 in chips is the same as setting a $100 bill on fire. But at the same time, you can't let the fear of losing your hard-earned money prevent you from investing your chips in the way that will be the most profitable.
But enough abstraction. Let's deal with the tangible aspects of poker chips, as they are used in casinos. All of the following points apply equally to both tournaments and cash games, with two exceptions, which I will note when we get to them.
Color Code
The dominant color of most poker chips is related to their denominations in a nearly universal way: $5 chips are red, $25 green, and $100 black. (If you're playing with chips above this, you're not likely to be new enough to poker to be reading this article!)
The exception is the $1 chip, which casinos order in a wide variety of color schemes, with either white or blue being the most common. Meanwhile tournament chips also do not usually follow this or any other consistent color pattern.
Stacking Chips
It is both courteous and strategically advantageous to keep your chips in neat stacks of 5, 10, or 20 chips each. This makes it easy for both you and other players to count or at least closely estimate how much you have on the table — a vital consideration in no-limit and pot-limit games.
You need to know at all times which opponents can 'stack' you (i.e., take all of your chips if you lose a big confrontation), or, conversely, how much you could potentially win from them. Players whose chips are in an unorganized heap, or in uneven stacks, or in which denominations are mixed together haphazardly, make this unnecessarily difficult.
Hiding Chips
For similar reasons, it is both against the rules and deeply unethical to hide one's largest-denomination chips from the view of other players.
If you play poker long enough, sooner or later you will encounter a dishonest player who carefully hides several black chips under or behind stacks of red chips. His goal is to get you to underestimate how much money he has in play. If, for example, you have $500 but see only $200 in front of the guy in seat four, you might be more inclined to call his all-in bet than you would be if you could see the six $100 chips he has stashed behind his stacks of red.
If you see somebody trying to hide his big chips this way, you not only may, but should point it out to the dealer. If you'd prefer not to risk being seen as a 'snitch,' you can step away from the table and tell a floor person about the problem.
Poker rooms have little tolerance for such 'angle shooting', because it upsets less-experienced players when they get deceived this way, and the casino does not want to lose them as customers.
Removing Chips
Once you put chips into play at the table, you cannot remove any of them until you remove all of them to cash out. That is, you can't pocket some of your winnings to ensure that you won't lose them, no matter how tempting it seems to do so. (I'll explain this in more detail in a future article when I address the whole subject of 'table stakes.')
Similarly, you cannot just give some of your chips to another player at the table, such as your spouse or best friend. If he or she needs more chips, they must be purchased from the casino. (You can give cash out of your pocket to another player, however.)
When Cash Plays
Most casinos allow at least some forms of cash to be used in poker games. The most common rule is that $100 bills, but no other currency, can be in play. However, a few casinos allow other denominations of cash to be used in poker games, while a few don't allow any cash on the table at all.
The only way to know the house rule on this point is to ask. When cash is in play, these bills are subject to the same rules about being kept easily visible to other players and not being removed from the table until you are leaving.
I think it will be obvious to you that cash never substitutes for or supplements chips in poker tournaments. In fact, poker tournament chips are usually explicitly marked 'NO CASH VALUE' so that nobody mistakes them for ones exchangeable for cash.
Personally, I prefer using just chips, so if I win a pot that has bills in it, I will ask the dealer or chip runner to trade me chips for them.
My reason for this idiosyncrasy — and I admit that that's all it is — is simply that when I look at chip stacks, either my own or other players', my brain tends not to register the bills the same way it does the chips. As a result, I've occasionally made large errors in estimating what amounts are in play. Apparently, other people don't have this problem. Do as seems best to you.
A possibly profitable tip: Many players, when in possession of a mixture of both chips and bills, will be much more reluctant to put the cash into the pot than the chips. This is precisely because of the psychological effect mentioned at the beginning of the article, in which chips lose their equivalence to 'real' money. For that reason, a player who is betting with his cash instead of or in addition to his chips is less likely to be bluffing than one who is betting with chips only, all else being equal.
Of course, like everything about poker 'tells,' this is not a universal phenomenon. But it's sufficiently common to make it worth paying attention to see if it's true about the specific players at your table, then using that knowledge to your advantage.
There a lot more to say — and to learn — about chips. In the next article, I'll explain the rules about making bets and raises with chips.
Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the 'Poker Grump' blog.
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Online Casino Cash Out
I have written before about optimizing play under the rules of common kinds of promotions offered by poker rooms for their cash game players. As a way of rounding out that series of articles, today I'll discuss several less-common promotions, and how you should deal with them.
1. Bad Beat Jackpots
The basic idea is simple: If one sufficiently strong hand gets beaten by an even better one, there's money to be given out.
Commonly this requires quads being beaten by either higher quads or by a straight flush. But sometimes you'll see the qualifying threshold drop as time passes without the jackpot having been won. For example, the losing hand requirement might slip down to aces-full, then kings-full, and so on, when nobody has claimed the prize in a long time.
Most often, the loser of the hand gets the lion's share of the money, with a lesser percentage going to the winner of the hand — a 75/25 split, for example. Under some promotions, a percentage is also set aside for a 'table share' (everybody seated at the winning table when it hits gets a piece), or even a 'room share' (ditto for everybody present). Sometimes the big casino chains, such as Caesars, or Stations Casinos in Las Vegas, will link all of their rooms in one city, and a share of the bonus is given to everybody playing in any of the linked rooms.
Under most circumstances, the optimum strategy when it comes to bad beat jackpots is simple — ignore it. Don't play starting hands that you otherwise wouldn't, nor stay in the hand longer than the poker situation calls for, just in the hope of hitting the jackpot. The odds are so stacked against you that it's not worth even a dollar or two extra to take a shot at it.
In fact, one could reasonably take this further, and say that the optimal strategy is not just to ignore the jackpot, but to avoid it — that is, choose to play in rooms where they won't be taking out of every pot a dollar or two that will eventually go to somebody other than you.
However, the optimum strategy can change. If the jackpot is huge, and the threshold for hitting it has dropped sufficiently far, you may find two reasons to be interested.
First, you might hit it. Except in the most incredibly favorable situations, it's still unlikely to be profitable to change either what game you play (e.g., switching to the lowest-stakes limit hold'em offered), or to change how you play any given hand — but it might be worth temporarily choosing to play in that room rather than another.
Second, the poker room is likely to swell with inexperienced, bad players chasing the windfall, and you can take advantage of the room's super-fishiness while it lasts.
2. Random Drawings
In Las Vegas, this kind of promotion is most frequently offered during big sports events, as the casino is trying to get you to choose them as the place to make your sports bets and play poker while you watch the game.
The giveaway can take many forms. One common example would be a drawing every time a team scores a touchdown during a football game. The prize can be either a fixed amount or a mystery envelope. The winner is determined at random, either by computer or by an old-fashioned drawing from a bowl.
There is no strategy to win, other than not to be out of the room on a break when each drawing takes place.
This is the rare kind of promotion that can actually be significantly positive in expected value. Money that the extra rake has taken from every pot over the previous week, month, or whatever, is given away in a highly condensed period of time. If you haven't been contributing to the giveaway fund by playing in that room, it is genuinely free money to you.
In fact, some of these promotions, such as on Super Bowl Sunday, are so strongly +EV that the seats get locked up hours in advance. If you have one, you might even be offered cash to relinquish your spot to somebody else who didn't get there early enough.
When the Tropicana was closing its poker room in 2012, they announced a plan to give away on the last day all the promotional money they had collected but had not yet distributed. From the amount they announced — over $16,000 — and the number of tables available, I estimated that just sitting in a seat for the eight hours they would be open would have an expected value of about $250. (I got one of the much-coveted seats, but, sadly, didn't get picked for any of the prizes.)
3. 'Paid to Play' Promotions
Once in a while in Las Vegas, a casino will offer a straight-up dollars-per-hour cash giveaway. These are functionally equivalent to promotional freeroll tournaments, except that you get cash instead of a seat in a tournament in which you might win cash.
All of the parade of horrible side effects that I talked about in my earlier article on promotional freerolls apply equally to these pay-to-play schemes, so I won't repeat them here.
My best advice — vote with your feet, and play somewhere else.
4. 'Spin the Wheel' Promotions
Casino Cash Out Ticket
In a few poker rooms, you'll see a big wheel — sometimes temporary, sometimes a permanent fixture. If some event happens to you, you get to spin it, and win whatever prize comes up.
The 'event' can be a high hand, a bad beat (usually with a much lower threshold than rooms with a big lump-sum BBJ), a random drawing, or some other special occurrence for a particular promotional period.
The amounts available are rarely over $100, and the most likely amount is typically $20-$25. These, then, are not life-changing bonuses, and it's virtually never going to be correct to deviate from otherwise optimal play in order to try to win a chance at one of them.
5. Comps
'Comps' refers to what are effectively cash vouchers that you can spend in the casino. For the most popular low-stakes poker games, casinos typically offer $1-$2 per hour of play.
Comps differ from all other kinds of poker-room promotions in one crucial way — they actually are free money, donated by the casino, rather than giving players back money that was taken out of pots.
For that reason, just about the only reason to decline them is if you have some important reason to want to avoid getting one of the casino's player's cards, which is a mandatory part of the process. If you're paranoid about privacy, you have a pathological aversion to being put on another mailing list, you're illegally playing in a casino from which you've been banned, or you will be unwilling or unable to show standard state-issued identification when you're redeeming the comps (as will be required), then go ahead and pass up the free money. Otherwise, take advantage of it.
The nuts and bolts of comps programs are all over the map:
- In some places, you have to check in and out at the poker room desk at the start and end of your play; in others they swipe your card at the table.
- Some will clock you out if you're gone from the table for more than a few hands; others won't.
- In some places, in order to use the dollars you've earned, you have to request a voucher for a specific amount to be written by one of the floor personnel; in others the credit is right on your player's card, and you can use it at your own discretion.
- In some casinos, the money is good at practically every retail and food establishment in the house; in others, it's highly selective.
- Under some programs, the money is good basically forever; in others, it has an expiration date, after which it vanishes.
- Most often the rate is fixed, but in some places, the hourly amount earned varies, with higher rates offered for the days or times when the room is slow (and they're trying to drum up more business).
- I've even seen one place let you use your accumulated credit to buy in to either tournaments or cash games, but that's rare.
One other hint, primarily for men: Don't use your comp dollars to buy dinner on a first date, because it makes you look cheap. I'll grant that every single aspect of that observation is stupid, sexist, outdated, and shouldn't be true. But it is true, nonetheless.
Play smart, at both poker and love.
Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the “Poker Grump” blog.
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