Tangible Proof That Bill Simmons Is A Loser

I've been eagerly awaiting an excuse-filled column from Bill Simmons explaining why he busted out two hours into the World Series of Poker and, today, he didn't disappoint.
According to Simmons, he was eliminated on a bad beat after playing a hand "perfectly". It took this incident to convince Simmons, a man who claims he knows all, that poker is a game of luck. To which I say, "No shit, high-voiced Sherlock."
After sending the link to Simmons' column to The Wolfman, he wrote back, "That article made me sick. I don't even want to talk about it. He's such a little bitch."
I had the same thoughts upon reading it, but I have to talk about. It would be a disservice to you, the procrastinating-from-work reader, not to. So, here goes.
Instead of writing a diatribe against the idiots who think playing poker takes skills beyond simple mathematical ability, I'm going to paste excerpts from Simmons' column and proceed to talk about why he's such an idiot.

I believed Mike McD for eight years. "People insist on calling it luck," he kept saying sarcastically. Sure. We all knew better.
If poker was about luck, as Mike says, the same guys wouldn't be sitting at the final table of the World Series every year, right?

The opener to Bill's whine-fest. The reason I hated the movie Rounders (in addition to the absurd final scene) was that line from Mike McD.
Poker is a card game. Card games are 80% luck. Sure, you have to decide what to bet, how to bet, when to bet and who to bet, but, in the end, nobody has any control over what cards come up. It's a game of chance. That's why it's called gambling.
Plus, the same people don't sit at the WSOP final table every year, even before ESPN brought hold-em to the masses. Look at the stats. It's science.

You know what poker is really about? Luck.
I found this out the hard way in Vegas, on the heels of my abrupt departure from the Main Event at the WSOP. I played a hand perfectly and somehow lost a $20,000 pot. That was it.

Simmons seemed to have no problem with luck when luck came in the form of some ESPN executive actually liking his preening columns and turning him into a writer on the biggest sports web site on the planet. Luck was pretty good for you then, wasn't it Bill?

I was done in two hours. Over the next 10 days, almost 9,000 other players were knocked out -- some for the right reasons, some for the wrong ones.

What, exactly, were some of the wrong reasons people were knocked out? Their use of haircare product? Beverage choice? A professed liking of Ashlee Simpson? Because unless people were knocked out for any of those reasons, I can't think of anything else that would be "wrong". If you don't have the best hand when the all the cards are out, you lose. Period. If somebody gambles stupidly and wins, then they deserve to win because they gambled and won.
I'm sure Bill wouldn't be complaining if he won a four-way parlay involving a Patriots win, the Browns covering, the Redskins/Cowboys going over and Duce Staley scoring a touchdown. He'd just be a genius for figuring that out, odds be damned.

At the final table, no famous pros were left sitting. A former Hollywood agent won the whole thing. Twelve million bucks. Nobody was even surprised.

Wait. Just two paragraphs ago you proclaimed that you weren't aware luck existed in poker until it bit you in the ass. Now you're saying that everybody knows poker is all about luck because they weren't surprised a former Hollywood agent won the whole thing? Which one is it? And does the former Hollywood agent get a five-year grace period from complaining about his own poker luck, a grace period which he'll then turn his back on four months later when the Red Sox get rid of Orlando Cabrera?

See, everyone thinks they know how to play now.

Translation: Only I and Johnny Chan really know how to play. Theo Epstein used to know how to play, but then he didn't make a move at the All-Star Break to keep up with the Cashman's.

Before Mike McD broke onto the scene, Hold'em was an underground game, the forbidden door most gamblers were afraid to open. But repeated cable showings of "Rounders" inspired a new breed of casual players like myself to give the game a try.

Aren't we giving Rounders an awful lot of credit here? What's next, attributing the fall of communism to Rocky IV? And in what way was hold'em ever an underground game? My dad played hold'em at that bastion of underground gambling, Cornell University, in 1970.

ESPN popularized the pocket cam and made the game easier to understand.

Yes, because making the best possible hand out of seven cards required two PhDs from Cal-Tech before Norman Chad explained it to the world.

This summer's Gaming Life Expo featured rows and rows of booths: for countless websites (even Anna Benson has one), start-up magazines and self-published books, for an autograph from your favorite player, for poker-related apparel and merchandise (if you've always wanted a polyester shirt with face cards sewn on the front, this is the place to find it). Skanky models were everywhere handing out free stuff, prompting my buddy Hopper to crack, "What time are they due back at Cheetahs?" The place makes a Star Wars convention look hip. At one point, my friends and I were staring in shock at a booth that featured giant oil paintings of various pros.

At least the people at the Star Wars conventions know they're dorks and embrace it. Simmons is just in denial that he's actually one of the losers he so easily derides.

Thanks to the waves of qualifiers who didn't have to front 10 grand, a different style of play emerged: overaggressive, cocksure, reckless.

If Simmons cared one bit about ethics and being honest with his readers, he'd mention how he paid his $10,000 entry fee before slamming people who won theirs in online qualifiers.
Did Simmons put up the money himself, did ESPN pay for it, was he sponsored by an outside company? It would normally be nobody's business, but when you martyr yourself in a column on a national website, it kind of is.

I mean, how can this be an accurate representation of skill? If you enter a major chess tournament, no matter how much you'd practiced, you'd get wiped out. Same for the Golden Gloves, a PGA tournament, PBA, you name it. But everyone has a chance in the WSOP.

This is the first logical thing Simmons has written in this column. But the question is, did he realize this before or after discovering luck actually played a role in a freakin' card game.

On the bright side, anyone can win. On the flip side, you can say the same about keno.

Wait. So poker is a game of intense skill that only Bill Simmons knows how to play, or it's a game that is total luck like keno. I'm totally confused. Maybe I'll turn on ESPN to see if the pocket cam can explain it to me.

Meanwhile, a wild Internet qualifier was calling everybody, trash-talking, even showing his bluffs after he won. He reminded me of a football QB who keeps throwing deep; eventually, you switch to zone and start to pick off his passes. Basically, he was Jeff George.

Everybody has a friend like this that plays in your home-games. They're unpredictable, irrational and lose more often than they win. But what's the point of knocking their game if they do, in fact, win sometimes? It's not my bag, I tend to play very conservative poker and wait for big hands (which also enables me to steal a few pots here and there). But why should I hate on anybody who has a different strategy, particularly one that I feel will work to my benefit most of the time?
Reckless players don't sneer at conservative ones, so why do conservative players sneer at reckless ones? Because somehow the conservative player is smarter?
Of course not; the conservative player just thinks he's smarter.
It's called gambling for a reason. Every time you make a play, you're gambling. If you're holding pocket aces, your odds of winning increase dramatically. But winning is by no means guaranteed. If you're holding junk, it's tough to win. But you still can, if you gamble and, gasp, get lucky.
Bill Simmons clearly knows this, but he somehow thinks his knowledge of the game gives him the right to complain if others don't conform to his idea of a poker player. And that's as idiotic as a fastball pitcher ripping on a knuckleballer. Different strokes for different folks. At least that's what Gary Coleman told me once.

Holding K-10 suited, I called his $550 bet along with two others. The flop? K-10-6. First guy called. Jeff came barreling in for another $1,200. Third guy folded. And I knew four things: First, I had the best hand (nobody had trips, I could tell from the body language.

If things two through four are anything but: "I'm a douchebag, a tool and have a ridiculously high voice," I'm going to be very upset.

Second, I needed to steal that $3,400 in the middle. Third, having played one big hand in two hours, everyone would know I meant business with an all-in wager. And fourth, with 20 grand in chips, Jeff George might be dumb enough to call me. Which he was. And you know what this nitwit had? A-K.

Damn. Anyway... Now, my poker expertise isn't close to that of super-genius Bill Simmons, but, let's look at the situation.
"Jeff George" has been playing recklessly all day. Bill Simmons has been keeping it close to the vest. After the flop, reckless Jeff has top pair and top kicker. It's not unreasonable at all for him to assume that he has the best hand, particularly because K-10 is the only realistic hand that Simmons can have that beats Jeff (more on that in a minute). Because Simmons has been a tight player, it's possible (even likely) that he doesn't have K-10 because playing K-10 is only acceptable for a tight player in a late betting position. Since Simmons didn't mention which position he was in, I'm going to assume he was one of the first players to bet. (That's a little trick of the dishonest; leaving out key details that normally would be included if said details contradict the dishonest one's thesis. Simmons' thesis: I'm smarter than everybody. Ergo, his position at the table on this hand is not mentioned.)
So, thinking he has the best hand, Jeff George bets $1,200. Simmons, knowing he has the best hand (which, despite his snide comment that he "knew" his was best because of body language, was an easy assumption) goes all-in.
At this point, Jeff George can think one of two things: Either this tight player [Simmons] is trying to bluff (or semi-bluff) at my pot or he's holding K-10 or trips. Those are the only two options. He knows Simmons doesn't have K-6 or 10-6 because he wouldn't have been in the hand with those rags. And trips seems unlikely because anybody with pocket kings or tens would probably have re-raised pre-flop to get out the riff-raff (another reason the "body language" line is so schmuck-like. Oh, there's also a chance Simmons could have had J-Q, thus giving his a straight draw, but since he was playing so tight, he wouldn't have called $1,200.)
Jeff George, for as reckless as he might be (and I'd love to know if his recklessness is a figment of Bill Simmons' imagination), thinks Simmons is playing the semi-bluff and calls the all-in. It's a rational (if misguided) play. (I say semi-bluff because, in all likelihood, he thought Simmons had a pair on the board, at least.) I'm not saying I would have made the all-in call if I was Simmons' opponent, but there were definitely hundreds of dumber calls made in the WSOP. Calling an all-in bet with top pair and kicker against a player who doesn't respect you and could easily be trying to steal a pot isn't as stupid as Bill Simmons wants you to believe.
So what happened (in case you couldn't already tell from Simmons' subtle use of Shakespearean foreshadowing at the top of the column)?

With the odds now significantly in my favor (84.3 percent), I was two favorable cards from taking control of the table. Even in that brief instant -- couldn't have been more than eight to 10 seconds -- I was dreaming about lasting the day, building a nest egg, getting lucky a few more times, maybe even making it through the week …Then, BOOM! It was over.
The dealer turned over consecutive queens, improbably giving us both K-Q pairs, but with an ace kicker against me. The rest was a hazy blur: watching Jeff celebrate in disbelief … muttering, "Wait, did I just lose?" … hearing the jerk next to me say, "You're done" … debating whether to punch the jerk, then deciding against it … eventually stumbling away like Bill Buckner at Shea.

I wonder if Bill Simmons punches like a girl or a baby girl. Hmm, guess we'll never know.
Yes, it was a bad beat that took Bill Simmons out of the tournament and bad beats suck. You're even entitled to sulk for a little after a bad beat. But after a few minutes you man-up and realize that bad beats happen all the time. When you sit down to gamble you lose sometimes even when all the odds are stacked in your favor. That's just what happens.
However, just because it was a bad beat doesn't mean Simmons played the hand perfectly. He didn't, because he lost. Sure, "Jeff George" made a call that defied mathmatical logic, but if Simmons knew Jeff was so reckless why did he go all in to show everybody that "he meant business?" If Jeff George was as reckless as Simmons' claims, proving to him that he had good cards couldn't have mattered much. Everybody else was already out of the hand, right?

It's one thing to get outplayed. It's another to lose to a reckless idiot. But that's poker in the 21st century: You need to be lucky. Period. I know Mike McD disagrees, but only because he's trapped in a suddenly dated movie.

That's not poker in the 21st century, that's poker ever since it's been invented. Again, they call it gambling for a reason.
And who are you, Bill Simmons, to act like you belong at the WSOP more than others? What has your contribution to the sport been? In which smoke-filled rooms did you hone your poker craft? I'm not getting the sense of entitlement that enables Simmons to believe he belongs in the World Series more than, say, Ben Affleck or this Jeff George character. (For that matter, how did Simmons know this cat was an internet qualifier? Again, it's not mentioned. Internet qualifier definitely carries a negative connotation. But maybe not as much as "guy who put the 10 grand entry fee on his expense account.")
Bill, you're part of the problem you're whining about. You are what you hate; the new guy who thinks he knows everything about poker just because he played in college and has sat at the tables in Vegas and AC a few times.
You're an idiot and a hack. And since you lost to Jeff George, that must make you Andre Ware or Browning Nagle. Wait, those are bad examples because at least those guys had talent at some point in their lives, which is more than I can say about you, Bill Simmons. Loser.