PZ105: Better Ranting with Dan Arfin

There are endless characters in poker, but the “post-literate” world only has so many journalists and bloggers recording and transforming them into stories. The ubiquitous vlogger, focused on selling his image, and photographer, focused on selling the industry’s image, can’t do it for legal and casino and formal reasons. This means the skill of storytelling is still in demand. One of the best doing it in poker right now is Las Vegas’ Dan Arfin.

Dan, like many writers, is focused on therapeutics for better living, and I don’t only mean storytelling. (He likes to open the show with a clock tower bell, which summons the monasticism of the grinder or the insanity of the lone gunman, but his most natural sound effect is the unthrottled vape that follows.) Poker results rock the player psyche, so a mental health angle has a strong tradition among its regulars. Grinders often need to come down from the performance high, or like Dan, must vent about the stressors. The main stressors in Dan’s case are the players themselves. That’s us. Yes, we torment Dan, so we’ve got a good and funny plot going on at Dead Money.

Dan divides his personality sharply, as many performers do. And like any good performer, he takes the show very seriously. Dan doesn’t even want to really talk at the table. I saw this when he played in my game, which pushes people to be social. Dan is one of the few kinds of players who doesn’t really like it, as he was clearly focused on beating the fish. Still, his big bluff versus the Gipper, which he described on his pod, was a lot of fun to watch in real time because any decent player recognized exactly what was going on. (If anyone had been listening as the cards were dealt, they would have heard me say, “Dan is going to win this pot.”) Off the felt, Dan is completely different, being talkative to the point of garrulousness. I didn’t even get to half my questions during our interview.

Dan says he “failed at comedy” but I think still has aspirations. Comedy is notoriously cathartic and so there is a strong link between it and poker. There are many poker comedians, including Clayton Fletcher, Joe Stapleton, and Yasar Al-Keliddar, who Dean in fact interviewed for the Zoo. We don’t have to look far for the reason: the dangerous, grey-area life, the constant stress, and the endless hungry and exasperating people in your face and in your business. The poker life absolutely demands a release. Stand-up does a lot for this; I remember recommending it to Gargamel back in his days of suffering through PNW poker and general male malaise.

We don’t directly talk much strategy, but Dan does provide insights as well as answering a big implicit question about his game: Dan likes big, polarizing bets, but do big bets always produce the most EV? The solver is “aggressive” but only because everything is about price and bluff catching. Small bets belong as well. As Dan notes, the pool doesn’t like these big bets, so his aggression is well-rewarded. The reason, of course, is that most of us play too big. It’s on account of pride and excitement and cost efficiency: like the link between poker and storytelling, the mystery is not much of a mystery. They’d call Dan’s ass at NL5, where most of us in live poker actually belong.

This of course brings us to the Dan-DGAF connection. Billy is notorious for having essentially ripped the risk-reward control nodule out of his brain wiring, making him indifferent to taking on substantial uncertainty where others would sense natural bankroll defeats. This, along with great observation skills, made Billy dangerous but also put him into substantial debt when he bit off more than he could chew. Dan employs his exploitative strategy differently, and this is a big part of our discussion.

I hope to have Dan on again later to get to some of the Las Vegas life and some more poker stuff. Also, there is another player who uses some of his tactics and even looks like him; I wrote about it one time. What’s that about? It will have to wait. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy our pod together.

See you (and Dan and Fake Dan) in the games.

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