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Regardless of your skill level, poker fundamentally is a social game. You sit around a table, alongside other humans, for hours at a clip. And you play a game. Unless you want to break up the table, it's important to comport yourself in ways that aren't offensive to your opponents.
With this in mind, based on a recent session at Casino M8trix in San Jose, here are five personas to avoid and five easy solutions to change your behavior, stat.
The smelly guy: There is no strategic advantage to smelling like a sewer. If you can afford to throw down a few hundred dollars at a no-limit table, you can afford to bathe. If players keep requesting seat changes from the spots next to you, it's a good bet you should have showered after leaving the gym.
The staller: Granted, some decisions in poker require serious thinking. But players who move at the speed of sloths and take multiple minutes before every call, fold or raise can derail a game. I equate this experience to conversing with a slow talker - at first it's uncomfortable, then it's just maddening. If you notice opponents calling "time" on you repeatedly, perhaps it's time to order a coffee or head home.
The kvetch: The Yiddish word for "complain" is kvetch, and, at the poker table, this sort of behavior is atrocious. The worst offenders are those who complain about bad beats - especially if the bad beats in question happened at other tables in other cardrooms at other times. If you're reminiscing to what feels like a bunch of crickets, you could be this person. The solution is simple: Shut up.
The lecher: One sad reality at Bay Area cardrooms is that an overwhelming number of poker players are men. Just because female sightings are rare, however, doesn't mean it's acceptable to leer at waitresses as they flit by. This behavior is particularly egregious when the staring actually stalls the game. If you catch yourself fantasizing about the woman who just delivered your Kung Pao chicken, get up and ask her out. Otherwise just play cards.
The aggressor: There is a benefit to overaggressive play at the poker table every once in a while. But throwing it all on the table for (just about) every hand is irritating. This behavior fails because it effectively prevents most of your (saner) opponents from playing. If you find yourself frustrated that nobody is calling your pre-flop all-ins, it likely is time to slow down a bit. Or hit the weight room.
Matt Villano is a freelance writer. E-mail: 96hours@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mattvillano
Posted by Mike Florio on September 18, 2013, 5:17 PM EDT
AP
As Eagles coach Chip Kelly tries to maximize the performance of his no-huddle, hurry-up offense, he needs maximum cooperation from his players.
So far, he’s not getting it.
Before Sunday’s unexpected loss to the Chargers, Sal Paolantonio of ESPN reported that Kelly has instructed his players not to leave the ball on the ground after a play but to hand it to an official. During Sunday’s game, Kelly’s players consistently left the ball on the ground.
The biggest culprit was running back LeSean McCoy. Based on a review of the full game broadcast, McCoy left the ball on the ground at least 10 times.
At one point in the second quarter, McCoy flipped the ball to the officials after a play. Soon after that, he left it on the ground, stopped, retrieved it, and gave it to the officials.
If the change was the result of being reminded about it on the sidelines after consistently failing to give the ball to the officials during the first quarter, it didn’t stick. He quickly resorted to leaving the ball on the ground after a play.
Others who left the ball on the ground at least once include running back Bryce Brown, receiver DeSean Jackson, quarterback Mike Vick, and receiver Jason Avant.
While it doesn’t create a major delay, every second counts in Kelly’s go-go offense. And for Kelly, who wants the system to run a certain way, it has to be maddening that the guys aren’t doing what they expressly have been told to do.
It’s unclear when they were first told to do it this way. Either Kelly has been harping on it throughout the offseason program, training camp, and the preseason and they continue to ignore him, or he has just realized only recently that time was being wasted by leaving the ball on the ground instead of getting it in an official’s hands.
Regardless, the Eagles could be getting even more plays called if the players start doing what Kelly wants them to do.
It’s unclear how many more snaps they would have had on Sunday against the Chargers. As it stands, Philly had only 58. San Diego had 79 plays from scrimmage, despite often draining the play clock in a no-huddle approach while quarterback Philip Rivers made changes based on the pre-snap look.
The Chargers ended up having the ball more than 40 minutes, too. Kelly has said that he’s not concerned about a 40-20 split, as long as the Eagles get their snaps in. On Sunday, it was less like the UCLA game Kelly mentioned in August and more like the far bigger NFL game in which the Buffalo K-gun offense was stymied both in time of possession and snaps by a grind-it-out Giants team.
While the Chargers did much more throwing than grinding on Sunday in Philly, they came up with an approach that others surely will copy in the coming weeks.
Starting on Thursday night, when the Chiefs and Andy Reid come to town.
Register TodayEarn Free CME Credits by reading the latest medical news in your specialty.Sign Up By Nancy Walsh, Staff Writer, MedPage Today Reviewed by F. Perry Wilson, MD, MSCE; Instructor of Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Dorothy Caputo, MA, BSN, RN, Nurse PlannerNote that this case-control study of concussed football players with mood and cognitive symptomatology showed higher uptake of a tau-specific tracer in MRI scans compared with healthy controls.Be aware that, as the burden of depression was lower in the control group, the findings of increased tau-protein among cases may be due to depression or cognitive impairment and independent of head injury history.
A new imaging technique has allowed detection of tau protein abnormalities in the concussed brains of living retired football players that are identical to the autopsy findings of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in deceased athletes, researchers reported.
Positron emission tomography (PET) scanning using a tracer for tau protein known as FDDNP found significantly higher binding values among retired players than in controls in several regions of the brain, including the amygdala (1.30 versus 1.14, P=0.03) and caudate (1.48 versus 1.23, P=0.03), according to Gary W. Small, MD, of the University of California Los Angeles, and colleagues.
In addition, the tau binding values were highest in the players who had experienced the most concussions during their careers, which "suggests a link between the players' history of head injury and FDDNP binding," the researchers wrote in the February American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
"If this research continues in the direction we expect, it would have a big impact on the early detection of this condition, helping us to develop interventions that could delay the onset of symptoms," Small told MedPage Today.
But it will be important to replicate these findings in larger studies, experts cautioned.
"If indeed it is sensitive and specific enough for tau, it would be extremely exciting and hugely important, but this was only five players," said Robert Cantu, MD, of Emerson Hospital in Concord, Mass., and co-director of Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.
The list of athletes who experience multiple concussions during routine play and then develop cognitive, behavioral, and mood disturbances, which in some cases lead to suicide, continues to grow, and some 4,000 former National Football League players are suing the league, claiming that the risks of repetitive head injury were long downplayed.
Autopsy findings in players who died have included deposits of phosphorylated tau in neurofibrillary tangles, as well as diffuse injury to axons and abnormalities of white matter.
Despite the increasingly widespread recognition that players with multiple concussions are experiencing severe consequences, research into the resulting condition has been hindered by the fact that no diagnostic test has been available that could identify changes before death.
Small and his colleagues developed the tau tracer FDDNP (2-(1-{6-[(2-[F-18]fluoroethyl)(methyl)amino]-2-naphthyl}ethylidene)malononitrile) with the goal of detecting the presence of tau tangles and amyloid plaque in the living brains of Alzheimer's disease patients.
They found that with this PET technique they could differentiate Alzheimer's patients from those with milder forms of cognitive impairment or normal changes of aging.
In the current study, they performed neuropsychiatric evaluations of five former players who exhibited mood or cognitive symptoms clinically, and then used PET scanning with FDDNP to examine their brains.
The players had played various positions, including quarterback, center, and defensive lineman, with careers ranging from 10 to 16 years.
The researchers also assessed five controls who were matched for age, body mass index, family history of dementia, and educational attainment.
Cases and controls were both about 60 years of age. The affected players had significantly higher scores on the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (8 versus 0) than controls, and also showed a trend toward lower scores on the Mini-Mental State Examination, which evaluates cognitive impairment.
Higher signals for tau binding were seen in a number of subcortical regions in cases compared with controls, including: Putamen, 1.47 versus 1.20 (P=0.05)Thalamus, 1.48 versus 1.29 (P=0.03)Subthalamus, 1.45 versus 1.25 (P=0.03)Midbrain, 1.31 versus 1.14 (P=0.03)Cerebellar white matter, 1.15 versus 1.09 (P=0.05)
The researchers explained that this pattern of findings was different from that seen in patients with cognitive difficulties but no history of head trauma, in elderly depressed patients, and in those with Alzheimer's disease.
While FDDNP can bind to both tau and amyloid in Alzheimer's patients, only a minority of CTE autopsies have identified amyloid plaques, suggesting that in these players, the high levels of binding signals are specific for tau.
"Using a tau marker for detection and tracking of neurodegenerative disease is critically important because severity of tau load, rather than amyloid burden, correlates with rates of neuronal loss," the researchers explained.
They noted that their findings should be interpreted with caution because of the limited number of players and the possibility that other factors such as genetics and overall cerebrovascular health might influence outcomes.
Small expressed hope that, if this diagnostic approach proves accurate in larger numbers, it may open the way to possible treatments.
"We know that inflammation is important both in Alzheimer's disease and traumatic brain injury, and in Alzheimer's we're testing anti-inflammatory and anti-tau treatments," he said.
"We also know that lifestyle choices and everyday health habits including diet, exercise, and stress management are important in protecting our brains," he added.
The study was supported by the Brain Injury Research Institute, the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation Fund for Alzheimer's Disease Research, the Ahmanson Foundation, and the Parlow-Solomon Professorship.
Two of the authors are among the inventors of a technique for labeling beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles and have received royalties. They also have received fees from several companies, including Janssen, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Siemens.
Primary source: American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry Source reference: Small G, et al "PET scanning of brain tau in retired National Football League players: Preliminary findings" Am J Geriatr Psychiatry 2013; 21: 138-144.
Nancy Walsh
Staff Writer
Nancy Walsh has written for various medical publications in the United States and England, including Patient Care, The Practitioner, and the Journal of Respiratory Diseases. She also has contributed numerous essays to several books on history and culture, most recently to The Book of Firsts (Anchor Books, 2010).
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