Res Ipsa Poker

Five random things to be thankful for this holiday week:

1. PokerStars, which continues to step up to the plate. Not only do they have just about the best site in the business (IMHO, along with Full Tilt), they continue to support the blogosphere in a way that's just incredible.

2. Bloggers who work for said sites who get and keep the attention of the companies when it comes to poker blogs.

3. The people who are organizing the WPBT event in December and those who are recruiting poker personalities to show up and talk to us ordinary folks.

4. Random fish who will stack off in a NL cash game with nothing more than TPTK.

5. Short work weeks and turkey with all the trimmings.

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Time for a new "feature" (using that term very loosely): One sentence book reviews!

I've been doing a fair amount of reading lately, especially after discovering that our local library has access to a pretty decent assortment of poker-related books. Here are reviews of three recent reads:

Ace On The River: An Advanced Poker Guide, by Barry Greenstein

Not like anything else I've ever read, amazingly broad yet deep, will be coming back to it again and again, has the most lavish photography of any $25 book ($16.50 Amazon) ever - glad I bought it.

The Professor, The Banker And The Suicide King: Inside The Richest Poker Game Of All Time, by Michael Craig

Deeply engrossing, immediately jumps into my personal top 3 in the category of 'books about poker-related events', highly recommended.

Moneymaker: How An Amateur Poker Player Turned $40 Into $2.5 Million At The World Series Of Poker, by Chris Moneymaker with Daniel Paisner

Better than I expected, not a bad read -- the guy is kind of a train wreck but honest about it -- I probably wouldn't buy it since I don't think i'd come back to it again and again.

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Random multi-table tournament musing:

Just how close to 50/50 does it have to be to be considered a coin flip?

In a sense, every time you push as a shorter stack, it's a coin flip -- you live or you don't. The odds don't matter as much.

I played one little tournament last night, and busted just inside the money (actually, I lost about $2 on the deal, stupid rebuys) when ATo pushed from the SB, I called with AQs in the BB and my opponent caught a T on the flop. According to Twodimes, I'm essentially a 75/25 favorite. Uh, right.

I do not complain -- there are no sure things, and any time you push in you're at risk -- but really. Luck is highly underrated as a factor in multitable tournaments. Doubly so at Titan, where the rapid escalation of the blinds in the second hour on ensures that you'll be in there gambooling any time you have a decent hand.

Stupid coin flips.