A Rubber Band Story and Other Poker Tales

By Tommy Angelo

A Rubber Band Story and Other Poker Tales collects the best poker articles from Tommy Angelo's first 12 years of writing and showcases them with eighteen new commentaries by Tommy about the works. Here you'll find war stories, poker fiction, ruminations on poker rules, and meditation, and more – including a strong selection of articles on tilt, the author's signature topic.  The new additions take you behind the curtain on Angelo's history and writing process.  New readers will appreciate the humor and fresh perspective on poker, and existing fans will enjoy this convenient anthology of Angelo's most popular material.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tommy Angelo
• Release date: Mar 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386021650

Tommy Angelo

Once, during a poker discussion in Las Vegas, several top strategists were debating how to play pocket kings under the gun. Then Tommy Angelo popped in with “I can tell you the best way to play two kings. Decide in advance that no matter what happens, you won’t go on tilt!” Insights like that are what drove the popularity of Angelo’s first book, Elements of Poker, a tome highly regarded for its fresh and practical perspectives. Since he began offering coaching in 2004, over one hundred students have paid for his candid advice, wanting more of what they found in his 100 articles and 18 videos. In 2017, Angelo completed Painless Poker. “I have no words left,” he wrote to his mailing-list fans. "I put them all in here.” Painless Poker combines sections of Angelo’s own history with a fictional poker-coaching seminar featuring seven suffering poker players, in an innovative combination of memoir, fiction, and poker instruction. When at home in Oakland, California, Angelo writes, cooks, reads, and makes music, as part of what he calls his “urban monastic lifestyle.” He cohabits with two cats, and Kay, his wife. 

Book preview

About This Book

It’s traditional, before a speaker comes on stage, for someone else to say a few words. It’s also traditional for much of the audience to use that time to check their messages or tap their foot. If you already know about Tommy Angelo and why you want this book, go ahead and flip ahead to the main event. If you’re wondering what this book holds, tarry a little and I’ll give you a tour.

Tommy Angelo is one of poker’s most highly regarded writers. He has fans. It’s not just the information – which is often fresh, useful, and from a perspective no one else has – it’s the delivery. There’s a sense of humor and a gift with words all too rare in poker literature. This book collects Tommy’s best short pieces from the last twelve years. Some he first wrote for magazines and some he told on his blog. They’re gathered together in groups, including a set called Musings, a large number of incidents that happened at a poker table, a collection of fiction, and an entire section of stories about Alex. So if you want to know who Alex is, turn right to page 51 for one of Tommy’s new introductions, and Tommy will tell you all about him. Or check out the last section if you most like hearing Tommy talk about tilt.

After we gathered his best tales, Tommy started adding forewords and afterwords, and some of them started to grow. Some of them talk about his history or his writing process. Some of them reveal new insights on poker. There are about 18 new pieces here, ranging from a few lines to a couple pages each – all only available in this book.

Since I have the privilege of introducing Tommy Angelo, I can describe him and embarrass him all at once. That is also traditional. If I had just one line to capture him, I’d say, Tommy Angelo is a multi-talented star of poker.

Like most stars, Tommy started humbly. He’s on record as saying poker first flirted with him when he was but a boy. Eventually, he began supporting himself by playing poker, and then progressed to coaching poker. As a coach, he quickly gained a reputation as the top choice for solving problems with tilt. World class players recommend him. Along the way, he invented a largesse of new poker terms, recorded an album of original poker songs, and folded AA before the flop (and told the world why). Tommy is one of a kind.

For myself, I’ve enjoyed working with Tommy since 2005. That’s when I hired him as a poker coach. I filled out the Tiltless questionnaire in generous detail, and received a warmhearted and ethical reply. Like most things that Tommy does, his first email to me was better than it had to be. Maybe it was the sense of humor or the lack of judgment, but eventually, when I’d studied my way through his Master Poker Outline half a dozen times, and the handful of typos was irritating the part of me that took the degree in English, I felt safe sending him, respectfully and with apologies for the presumption, a few corrections.

To tell the truth, I expected a cool reaction. Most people think of editing as on a par with dental work. Some find it worse.

Little did I know that Alex had already been editing Tommy for years, and Tommy had a taste for it. He said my edits were the best gift I could have given him, and offered to pay for more. That’s been working well for us ever since. Alex continued to mark Tommy’s pages with broad strokes while I filled in the details. It’s a bit as if Alex has a marker and I have a mechanical pencil.

I feel extremely privileged to see Tommy’s writing early. First, there’s the ideas he comes up with. He consistently looks at poker from a different angle. It’s like that moment when you put on the 3-D glasses and elements you hadn’t even noticed pop out at you. Suddenly this game makes more sense.

Then there’s Tommy’s way of writing. From an incident or a single attractive phrase, Tommy begins gathering related thoughts, bundles them together, passes them by me and Alex and sometimes several more early readers, rewrites, reorganizes, and polishes the words to a brilliant sheen. Along the way, I give input on structure and word choices, and see my thoughts appreciated, while I have the luxury of watching Tommy carve excellence from assorted raw materials in a remarkably stress-free fashion. Most of the writers I know would sell organs to revise their writing with that little angst.

Finally, there are the words. Writers and editors develop a sensitive palate for words – and Tommy’s words are delicious. His sentences are simple and clean and casual – he might be talking just to you – and they are seasoned with humor and insight and the exotic spice of words he’s creating. It’s all just right.

So let’s delay no longer. You in the second row, you can turn off your Blackberry. I promise what comes next will be worth your attention.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to present Tommy Angelo.

Best wishes,

Anna Paradox

Musings

Time is on My Side

2 0 0 1

I have a little plaque someone gave me that says:

"Don’t write because you want to say something.

Write because you have something to say."

Time is on My Side was my tenth article or thereabouts. It was the first one I was really proud of. The idea came to life the instant I saw the word cathemeral in a science magazine. Well, I had some things to say about cathemeralism, once I knew there was such a thing. And that led to saying other things about other things until I came to a point where I felt like I actually had something to say. Writing rocks.

I recall struggling with the ending. I had come to the end, but there was no ending. And whenever I added more sentences, they went nowhere. I asked my friend Matt Flynn to take a look at it. The version he saw is exactly like the one below, minus the final four words, which Matt suggested, and I instantly knew were perfect. Thanks Matt!

Playing poker for a living has leveled my perception of time. A once bumpy road is now paved, making for a smoother ride.

Here’s a nifty word: cathemeral. It completes a trio of biological terms. Animals active at night are nocturnal. Daytime animals are diurnal. Animals that do not have a 24-hour cycle are called cathemeral. A cathemeral animal eats and sleeps on no set schedule. That’s me.

My buddy Alex is cathemeral too. We had to redefine yesterday, today, and tomorrow to keep from getting mixed up. Instead of using the arbitrary selection of midnight as the end of today and the start of tomorrow, we use sleep sessions. In my time frame, yesterday is the time period between my two most recent sleeps, today is the interval between now and the next time I go to bed, and tomorrow is the next time I wake up.

Alex and I speak in the other’s time frame. Let’s say it’s 6 a.m. Tuesday morning and Alex is leaving the casino and headed for bed when I walk in to play. If I say, Let’s golf tomorrow, this does not mean on Wednesday. It means, Let’s golf after you wake up, which would still be Tuesday. In this example, my today extends into his tomorrow. Einstein would approve of the way Alex and I travel through time, with both observers’ reference frames equally valid. Weird, yes, but functional. We’ve never missed a tee time.

This line from a song by The Who is often true: Tommy doesn’t know what day it is. And not just days. I lose track of which week it is within a month. And even months are a cause for pause sometimes. But not years. I’d never lost track of one of those, until this year.

Back in grade school I was a gold-star arithmetician and prognosticator. Check this out. I’d take 2000 and subtract 1958 (my birth year) and come up with the right answer every time: 42, my age in the year 2000. The teachers were impressed too.

Those numbers, 42 and 2000, were etched into my mind. So, when 2001 started, that meant I was 43. What it really meant was that I would turn 43 during the year 2001. But somehow, because of the etching, I sincerely and wrongly began stating my age as 43 at the start of 2001, eight months before I would actually turn 43. I had shifted my birthday from August to January without even realizing it.

The awakening came in June 2001. I was buying tickets for an August concert. The date of the concert was the same as my birthday, and that got me thinking, wow, I’m 43, about to turn 44, and I’ve still got good gums. Not bad. But wait! I can’t turn 44 in 2001 because 44 and 1958 are even numbers, meaning I won’t turn 44 until an even-numbered year, namely, 2002. Duh.

By figuring out that I was still 42, I gained a year in an instant, just by being an airhead. It’s like the thrill that a regimented person gets each fall when clocks are set back one hour. Free time from nowhere, except instead of one hour, I had picked up a whole year. It was like finding a wad of money that had been stashed away and forgotten.

But when you think about it, it doesn’t make sense that I got all happy about finding a misplaced year. After all, I’m going to live however long I live and that’s that, right? Plus, numbered ages such as 42 and 43 are whimsically based on our planet’s lap-time around the sun. Like that really matters? Our concocted units of time are useful because we agree on their meaning, but they have no effect on the actual time that passes. The notion that I had gained a year by miscalculating my age was an illusion. So why did it feel so good?

The thrill came from the mere thought of having more time.

When we think of what is ours, money and possessions come to mind. But the only thing that is truly ours, the only thing that can never be taken back, the only thing we’ll have until we die, the only thing that is ours at every moment, is time. Nothing is more valuable. And as my appreciation of time grows, so does my appreciation of time with people.

Living in the moment is an ideal that has always appealed to me. Back when I was diurnal, I woke at certain times and ate at certain times and planned everything around numbers on clocks and calendars. Living in the moment was a dream on a shelf.

Then I took up poker full-time and I became cathemeral and some years went by. Without effort, I gradually spent more and more time in the present. And I figured out why. My old lifestyle had hours and days and weeks coming and going all over the place. My new lifestyle didn’t. It was the constant tracking of time that had distracted me from today – whatever day that is.

Folding

2 0 0 6

I played poker for ten years before I discovered folding in 1984. That’s when I met Bobby. He had a big belly, a big beard, and a big laugh. Bobby was like Santa Claus, minus the giving. He just kept throwing his hand away, and he didn’t seem to mind. Then he would carry the money away, and the players didn’t seem to mind.

So I started folding more often, to see what would happen. I folded before the flop with ten-nine a couple times. I folded queen-eight suited. I folded an ace when somebody raised. It was so new, so exciting. I was high from it, like an explorer. I kept adding more hands to not play, trying to get my starting-hand folding rate up with Bobby’s. But it didn’t stop there. Oh no. Before long I got hooked on the hard stuff, like folding on the river when I had a good hand.

Soon I went to Vegas. After a week in the desert, I felt like Charles Darwin must have felt on the Galapagos Islands, having traveled to an isolated land, where he found strange new ecosystems populated by bizarre species. What I discovered on Las Vegas Island was that in the poker ecosystem, at the top of the food chain, sat the folders.

I need to stop here and tell you exactly the kind of folding I mean. I’m talking about folding that is done often, and conspicuously, and audaciously, and without a fuss.

Every now and then in the Vegas games, a non-folder would say something to a folder, sometimes friendly sometimes not, about playing so tight. I couldn’t get over how comfortable the folders were, with all of it, with the folding, with the comments, and they’d just sit there, behind their tall stacks and long smiles, and muck, one more time.

I was like, okay, I see how this works now. It’s like a club. The folders club. Well, whatever it was, I wanted in.

After my first taste of big-time folding, I felt that if I could get really good at it, I could quit my job. So I made folding my holy grail, my quest, my mountain to climb. I could see the mountain. I could see my path. I looked at the ground in front of me, and I took a step.

By 1990 I was folding enough to support my food and rent habit. This freed up lots of time for lots more folding. Before long I got so good at folding that I could afford to get stupid at first one flavor of gambling then another and another. My tether line to solvency was always the folding. Anytime I was low on money, all I had to do was stop betting and stop eating and get back to the folding.

Eventually I outpaced the gamble demon and the cigarette demon and the tilt demon and several others I met along the way. My path became a gentle incline that coaxed me up to a sunny ledge where I stopped, and sat, and I looked around in wonder, for I could see the top of the mountain far away and high above, and I could see the bottom, waiting for me, should I neglect my folding.

When I play now, in 2006, one of the things I don’t do during the opening drive of the game is wager much. I like to get to the folding right away. My ideal session starts with a sip of coffee, then somebody raises and I fold from the big blind, then another little sip before I fold my small blind, then I take as big a sip as the coffee’s temperature will allow, and I sit up straight, and I get ready to play my button, and I exhale consciously, and most likely fold.

Which brings me to the hand that got me to writing about my folding fetish in the first place.

The game was live $80-160 limit hold’em. It was my first hand of the session. I was in the big blind with ace-ten off-suit and no hearts. One player limped, the small blind folded, and I checked. We were headsup going into the flop with me first.

The flop came ace, ace, nine, with two hearts.

I checked. He checked.

The turn was the eight of hearts.

I checked. He checked.

The river was the seven of hearts,