Meeting Ray Zee and Tommy Angelo

Posted by bellatrix

January 28, 2008

Sorry, I haven’t been posting. But when you are turning in a PhD thesis and moving to another city, there’s a lot happening in your life, that is not poker related. I have a backlog of ideas that I still want to publish in this blog, so I hope you don’t despair.

One thing I do want to write about is the meeting with some 2+2ers I had about 2 weeks ago (I know, I know, 2 weeks is a long time). Perhaps you have heard of Ray Zee (an article about him) and Tommy Angelo (his website), perhaps not. Stox (his website) was about to show up, but he went to the wrong pizza place, LOL.

So anyway, why this brag post? Just besides the fact that I met so many poker players and there were so many smart people in the room, was meeting people from “the old days”. Ray Zee had such great story arsenal in him and most of the time we didn’t even talk about poker. It was just amazing on how much he knew about the people and the casino business in general. I’ve known players who’ve played more than a million hands of poker and have never set foot in the casino. Poker has changed so much, but in the end it still remains a casino game, a gambling game.

What is my point? My point is that although I’m a very math oriented person, that is not going maximize you the dough when you are in a casino environment. This is me talking beyond poker EV and such things. Yes, you will have a positive value when you play very logically and that will mostly work online. But if you wanna make that extra buck, there’s more to it. Ray was kind enough to provide me with some information on that casino environment. It was like: “Great! Now you’ve calculated the theoretical expectation and you got your math figured out, so you are doing it the right way. Now go maximize it!” Sigh! I wish I could say more, but most of it didn’t involve poker anyway, so…

All the people that showed up that evening were funny and engaging. It is interesting how people start to resemble themselves once you move past a certain limit or a certain knowledge barrier in poker. I was very humbled to be there.

On other news I’m training a bit for the Heads Up Limit Association (HULA) tournament. We are having a go at it in the next weeks, so if you are interested in me posting about some spewy play, I hope to indulge you.