Continuing… That being handled, I leave a wakeup call for 0430 as I want a shower and a couple shower-sunrisers before we leave. It takes me about 10 minutes to pack. I call home to let Es know what’s going on. She’s not in, so I leave a message. Same for my friends Rack and Ruin of the Agency. They’re thrilled so far with my reports.
The security forces here are absolutely going to freak if they reverse-review my phone records once we leave.
Covert? Schmovert. I’m too old for playing such games.
The next morning, after a sudsy shower and a couple of vodka-infused shower-beers; I’m in the lobby with all my kit, checked-out, and waiting on the tour leader. My passport was stamp-stamp-stampity-stamped here at the hotel, which I thought was weird, but after spending time in this here country, not all that unusual.
At 0545 on the dime, the tour bus pulls into the lot. Without a word, bellhops grab near all my kit and escort it out to the waiting bus.
After tipping each extravagantly, I fire up a huge cigar, and wander around outside, loitering by the bus. I see members of my team at the front desk, checking out. Everything’s been paid for already, they just have to sign documents that they’re not secreting hotel towels or televisions or errant nationals in their luggage.
It’s a weird country.
I see them loading box breakfasts for us as well as box lunches on the bus.
Hell, they’re actually doing ‘field trip’ correctly.
If the bus us fueled up, we can go for days at this rate. There are several coolers bearing the hotel’s brand and I sidle over to see what they’re carrying.
Case after case of iced-down beer and a couple of cases of various high-octane potables; and over there? A couple of boxes of mixers…ah, soda…pop…carbonated citrusy goodness.
“OK”, I sigh, “All is as it should be. Now the field excursion may begin.”
My teammates filter outside as does their luggage. I suggest they get out and keep what is necessary for preliminary outcrop excursions; such as a backpack or knapsack, hammer, acid bottles, field notebooks, Brunton compass, lighters, cameras, personal tobacco products, and the like in the bus. That way, we don’t have to go tearing through all the luggage at every stop.
I pull out a bundle of 100
Hubco™ large geological
dual-sample bags. That’s right: ‘dual’ sample…
I distribute these to everyone on the team. I ask that they devise their own numbering system and make absolutely certain I have a copy of it when we’re done. I’ll be correlating and curating all the samples when we get back to the world.
I ask that a cooler of drinks are left on board the bus, rather than in the hold. It’s humid, sticky, and muggy today. We must expend valiant effort in remaining hydrated and this will help.
Luckily, the bus has on-board lavatory facilities.
We are seated on the bus, my 10 collective team members, myself, our 4 ‘guides’, ‘Yuk’, ‘No’, ‘Man’, and ‘Kong’; our driver, relief driver, one incredibly shy national geologist, Myung-Dae Soo, and four of the shiny suit clan.
The hotel wheels out a large cart laden with pastries and a huge coffee urn. A bit of a “
Bon Voyage” from the casino and bar crowd, as they put this together for us when they heard we were leaving.
“Hey. That’s really nice of them.” Dax notes.
Dax handed over our raw “elevator waiting” funds as we didn’t have time to run it through the casino-machine before we left. We donated over 75,000 won to our friends at the bar, casino, and massage parlor. The ones delivering our going away present assured us it would be divided equitably.
“It best be”, I laughed, “You never know when one of us might be back!”
There was a collective horrified look on their faces for the merest moments. Then they all laughed and said that they hoped we would return someday soon.
“Nice folks”, I thought, “Stupid as shit country, but nice folks.”
We had all separately left tips for the room maids, bellmen, and matrons back before we checked-out.
There was a flurry of handshaking and goodbyes. Not a bad hotel experience here in the so-called land of Best Korea.
Serious dark coffee was passed out amongst the riders, but Ivan, myself, and Dax were already giving one of my emergency flasks a workout.
Ivan smiled and said: “We drink our coffee the
Russian way. That is to say we had vodka before it and vodka afterward. HA!”
Ivan and I are cut from the same bolt.
Faux-doughnuts, pseudo-bear claws and fake-long johns all distributed; the bus is fired up, and rumbling. We are exhorted to watch our drinks as we pull away from the hotel and into the wilds of Northern Korea.
I’m humming away:
On the road again -Just can't wait to get on the road again,
The life I love is bashing rocks in the field with my friends.
And I can't wait to get on the road again
On the road again.
Goin' places that we've never been,
Seein' things that we may never see again…
--
“Rock?”, Dax inquires.
“Yes?” I reply.
“Do please shut up.”
“Music hater”, I muse and comply.
We’re rolling down the highway, as it were, headed generally north. We all have cameras of one kind or another; and rather than relieve us of them, they quietly and without much fuss, slowly darken the windows.
They claim it’s to keep the sun out and temperatures down, but just before things go all black, we’re seeing sights and scenes of the true North Korea. They’re trying to keep us from seeing that en route to the outcrops.
This new bus has some sort of electronic tint-control gizmo for the windows. However, if one has a pair of polarizing sunglasses, as all good field geologists do, you see right past that and can view the passing scenery unencumbered.
I return from a quick beer-recycling loo trip and am amused to see 10 Western scientists, sitting in a blacked-out bus, all wearing polarizing sunglasses.
It was just the surreal note this trip needed as we left the confines of the capital city.
We traveled north, and the empties pile began to grow. We had a few trash bags we had liberated from the hotel, but the shiny suits were very insistent that every empty can, bottle, and bag, yes they had beer in bags…had to be repatriated to a box in the far back of the bus.
Evidently, they either were paid a bounty on each container or were accountable for each vessel. They were soon to realize just the capacity for drink that a group of 11 seasoned very Senior Field Geologists, and one stowaway geologist-in-training can amass.
As we ply our way northward, we see the agricultural side of North Korea. The contrast between rural areas and the capital was striking. There were miles of rice paddies being harvested by people with sickles in their hands. And no cars on the highway. It was most destabilizing for this Westerner.
I think we saw a maximum of three tractors, as most of the work was done with ox power, there was very little evidence of rural electrification. Oh, hold on. We saw many more tractors, I should correct that: we saw three
running and not rusted
into oblivion tractors.
The farmers we see are using equipment that is quite literally medieval - single-share plows pulled by large, cranky bovines; sweeping sickles to bring in the harvest, and twin-engine, bilateral, botanical-fired ox-carts to transport it. It’s hard to believe that this third-world level of poverty exists in the same country that’s capable of building rockets, nuclear weapons, and tall, well-appointed hotels.
But when we stop at a motorway service station for fuel - a bizarre alien spaceship-like building squatting over the empty carriageways - we do encounter a
jangmadang, or semi-official market. Here they are selling cans of knock-off Vietnamese Red Bull and Malaysian-made King Cobra™ Cola.
It reminds me of Russia right after the wall fell. Off the Trans-Siberian Railway in Krasnoyarsk, the Gateway to Eastern Siberia. You can buy Chinese hams, Chinese sodas, Chinese knock-off liquor, and those bloody delicious little bullets of Vitamin-C, Chinese mandarins.
Here, it’s similar. You can get most anything you desire, except it isn’t of Korean manufacture. That stuff is even too shitty to pawn off on tourists.
Instead, it’s knock-off Malaysian, Chinese, or Indonesian beer, wine, or soft drinks.
“Tiger-brand energy drink. Now with 40% more real tiger.” Here? I believe them.
Vodka from everywhere not known for its vodka distilling prowess. Rural hotel shops sell nastily stale crisps, gummy gummies, filling-ripping ‘chewy’ taffy or caramel, and biscuits with a severely limited choice. Rural hotels do not have full electricity so beer is warm and often tossed on the table, waiting for tourists to arrive - as is the food. We were warned to be prepared for cold rice, cold fish, cold potato – and plenty of kimchi and tofu.
Back on the road again, we’re passing small burgs that are not on any of our maps; even the ones we traded for back in the hotel that are specially marked: “For Internal Use ONLY!”.
They were amazingly the same. Clean. Bright. Uncluttered. And attended by cadres of prim, uniform-clad, though non-military people. They were all doing a day’s work keeping everything neat and clean.
There were no cars, trucks, forklifts…only rickshaws and ox-carts. However every one of these ‘towns’ were identical, and exactly, as Ivan pointed out, ‘X’ number of minutes apart.
“Watch! Is so!”, Ivan said. We passed one of these villages, and exactly 3 minutes later, an exact copy. Three minutes later? Another one. 3 more minutes? Xerox-city.
“What the fuck?” Dax asked.
“Potemkin village.” Comrade Dr. Academician Ivan replied.
A Potemkin village is any construction, literal or figurative, whose sole purpose is to provide an external façade to a country which is faring poorly. It is for making people believe that the country is faring better, although statistics and data would suggest otherwise.
“Russia pioneered the process,” Ivan noted with no small amount of pride. “During Cold War with West, entire cities were built, moved, raised, and razed. Ever hear of Krasnoyarsk-25? Atomic Research City? Supposed place of weapons study and manufacture. Huge ‘accident’. Entire city demolished, total populace relocated supposedly, after massive nuclear calamity.”
“Is that true? Cliff asks.
“No. Not at all.” Ivan smiles, “Deliberate misinformation. At least for K-25. It was diversion for actual towns where accidents; nuclear, biological, or worse, had happened. West so concerned about K-25 because it was big, near big capital city of Krasnoyarsk and suitably located out in the taiga. Easy to spot, easy to watch. Kept Western satellites busy while real towns of I-33, U-10, and AR-13 out in the forest were quietly demolished and people relocated or mass buried after some horrible, horrible accidents...”
“You think it’s the same here?” I asked Ivan.
“No, Dr. Rock”, Ivan smiled, and helped himself to my freshly constructed, but untouched, Yorshch, “This is all fake and bluster. Make West think everything is all A-OK, is that right idiom?”
“Yep.” I reply, “Precisely.”
“Make West believe all is OK and green”, as he winks at me, “And bustling and growing. Cover up what is real case here. We all see it and we see right through. Shoddy even for Asians.”
We all had to snicker and smirk as the shiny suit squad, who sat up at the front of the bus, and were not supposed to be listening; reacted like every cell in their bodies were just hit with a drop of pure lemon juice.
“Comrade Dr. Academician. Decorum, please.” I snickered.
“Oh, fuck them!”, Ivan replied, “I am old Russian. They try and pull burlap over my eyes? St. Petersburg? Moscow? Krasnoyarsk.? I’ve been there, seen them. They think this display of tawdriness…Even goofy American and Canadian can see the fakes they are. Britisher? I’m not so sure…”
“Damn, Doctor., I said to Ivan, “You’re just making friends all over the planet today.”
We all knew it was in jest; but the shiny suit squad certainly had their feathers ruffled and either didn’t care or wanted us to know we were under their observation.
“Fuck them twice”, Ivan said, “Ask them for bottle opener. I’m too lazy to search for my field jackknife.”
I hand him my pocket Leatherman and he pries the top of another bottle of ‘Budveiser’ beer.
“They can’t even make fake the name correctly”, he smirks and drains the bottle.
‘Town’ after ‘town’ and even that parade gets uninteresting. We’re headed north and finally come to a crossroads.
The bus driver, who must be a regular paranoid-maniac because he actually stopped to look for oncoming traffic, which we have seen precisely none since leaving the capital city, made a hard right. We’re heading back and up into the hills, leaving the bright lights of the big city far behind.
After an hour or so of driving, we pull off to the left-hand side of the road.
“Rock, Ivan, Cliff…holy shit, look at this!” Dax was uncharacteristically excited.
It was an open field that leads to a series of low outcrops of polychromatic, obviously sedimentary rocks. Magentas, greens, purples, rust-reds, browns, blacks, olive greens…holy shit. A real sedimentary pile.
We filed out of the bus with our field gear. The shiny suit squad started in with a bullhorn.
“You will wait for tour guides!”
“You will listen to group leaders!”
“You will not stray from the designated paths set up…”
No one heard them as the group of 11 remaining Western geoscientists were already across the highway and hieing for the exposures like outcrop-seeking multiple-warhead re-entry vehicles.
“You must wait!” we heard from exasperated voices back at the bus. “You must stop!”
“You must piss off!” Cliff said, “This is what we’ve been waiting over two weeks to see!”
“They are very angry with us”, Myung-dae the young Korean geologist said. “I find that just too bad.”
“And you are?” I asked.
Myung-dae Soo, the young Korean geologist, introduced himself.
“Well”, I said, “Welcome aboard. I’m Dr. Rock.”
“They are very, very angry”, he repeats.
“So? Are you tagging along to give them internal reports?” I asked.
“No, Doctor”, he replied, “I too am a geologist. I want to get away from those assholes and see some real rocks.”
“Who are you with?” I ask, “What group?”
“I am 5th-year student at Pyongyang College. I am not
officially here. We were told in class that you were coming. I decided to see if I could join you. This morning, I was standing by bus and they thought I was hotel worker or orderly. I was given cooler full of beer and told to find place for it on the bus. I did and after that, just stayed in the back. I am stowaway. I am ashamed, but I had to see for myself. But, I like Western field trips so far!”
“No shit? Well, then”, I said, “Double welcome aboard. None of this ‘I am ashamed’ shit. You’re a geologist, but you haven’t even worked through your first field-evening get-together with us. But this is no pleasure cruise. It’s real work, real geology, real serious science shit. You savvy?”
“Yes, sir, Doctor Rocknocker from Sultanate in the Middle East.” Myung-dae smiled.
“And you fucking stay close to me”, I smirked.
I fired a couple of
BLAAATS! from my portable air horn.
“Field Meeting! Field Meeting! Assholes & Elbows!” I called aloud.
Everyone gathered within earshot.
“OK, guys, here’s the deal. We do not know how long we’ve got here. So, let’s split up into teams. Geophysicists, go do your structural thing. Stratigraphers? Field relations. Geologists? Let’s go talk to some ronery-rooking-rocks. No offense, Mr. Myung.”
Myung-dae was laughing up a storm. He got that reference. He later told us all around the campfire he thought ‘Team America’ was a “fucking hilarious movie.”
Oh, we are going to be a
real bad influence on this poor kid.
The groups spontaneously broke up into 4 or 5 sub-groups. They headed for areas they thought were important and they were photographing, measuring, pounding on rocks, and arguing within minutes.
“No, you idiot! It’s continental. Look at those adhesion ripples.”
“The fuck you know. It’s only a little low-level eggbeater tectonics. Where the fuck would you get continental collision-size energy around here?”
“Oh, the fuck you say. It’s non-marine. Those are mud cracks. Look at the sandy aeolian infill, fer chrissake.”
Formal? Proper? Detached Doctors of Geology?
Not when you’re in the field. It all goes out the window when different opinions collide like subducting plates.
“The music of my people!” I said to Morse.
“I thought that was the ‘Safety Dance’?” he chided.
“We’re a big family. We can have more than one.” I snickered.
We’re wandering around the site, with individual purpose.
We are looking for or looking at
items of interest.
We’re hacking at the outcrops.
We’re all looking at…
things.
It’s hard to describe. Get a load of geologists or geology students out of the office, lab, or classroom; stick them out on a bare expanse of heavily weathered rock and it’s simply…numinous.
We’re rebuilding worlds here.
This rock says this.
This rock says that.
And you’re not fluent in that dialect. Here, let me interpret for you…
We’re at each other’s throats, in the academic-metaphorical sense. Tempers have been known to run hot. There has been the occasional bloody nose or rocks sailing down an outcrop without the obligate “HEADACHE!” call. Hammers and Marsh Picks have ended up swimming without the owner’s knowledge.
But once we’re back; settled in the hotel room, tavern, or around the campfire, we’re all a Band of Brothers again. It’s an odd thing to watch; as if you’re not of the clan, you’d need an interpreter. It defies all boundaries: political, sexual, educational, geographical, linguistic, social,
et cetera.
We’re all geologists first. We share the common scientific bond of Geology.
That’s why Geology is
the First Science.
Plus we tend to drink a serious fucking whole bloody awful lot.
We’ve all been on that ‘crawlin’ home puker’.
We’ve also been to the ends of the earth: the deepest depths, the highest heights, we deal with the greatest pressures, the hottest temperatures; we’ve been to the mountain, we’ve seen the elephant, and we’ve held a bear’s nose to dogshit.
We wear the scars attained in our travels like badges of honor.
We’re God-Damned
Scientists.
Back off, man.
Geologist comin’ through. Anyways, I’m looking at the bedding-plane boundaries between the purple unit and the underlying olive-green unit. The upper unit it looks, to me, continental in origin. Fluvial, perhaps. The lower unit is much finer-grained. Marine mudstone, perhaps? But what age?
The cadged Korean Geological maps are worse than useless. They never would go down to the outcrop scale. Consulting them, they don’t even note these exposures in a field sense.
Myung-dae, who is working about 35 meters down-section from me calls out, “Doctors! Sirs! Look here! I’ve found something!”
We all wander over as he is hacking away at the dusty, eroded rock. He stands and dusts off his find.
It’s a very large, nearly 1-meter diameter, coiled fossil cephalopod.
I wander over for a closer look. Dax, Cliff, Morse, and Ivan do as well.
“Blimey! Will you look at that? Outstanding, Mr. Myung!” Cliff says.
“Well, that confirms it. This layer, at least, is marine. Look at that suture pattern”, I say, dusting off an unweathered bit.
“Look at the radius of coiling.”, Cliff joins in.
We’re slowly wresting information out of this silent witness.
“Ornamentation?”, Dr. Ivan asks. “Knobs, bosses, and excrutions?” Oh, yes.”
In unison, we declare: “
Hyphoplites!”
Morse adds, “And therefore…these rocks are middle Cretaceous. Marine. Not bad…”
“Need to get some samples for geochemical analysis. Dig deep, gentlemen, we need unweathered samples for TOC (Total Organic Carbon) content.”, Dr. Erlen Meyer notes.
With that, we have a relative age of the rock, a good idea of its depositional environment, and therefore extent, ideas of field relationships, and an indication of some of its fauna.
Could it be source rock worthy?
Samples? Best get diggin’, Beaumont.
That unit is right smack in the middle of this pile of rocks. Dax and I will work up-section and Ivan and Cliff will work down-section. We’re going to see what lies above, what lies below, what trends we can discern, and develop an idea of what happened here some 100 million years ago.
This is what happens when you get geologists out in the field with the proper amounts of field gear, outcrops, and alcohol.
Overall, the deeper down-section, and therefore, earlier in geological time you go, the more marine the rocks are. Conversely, the higher you go in the column, i.e., up-section, into younger rocks, the more continental it appears.
We find fragments of marine fish fossils, sea-crocodile scutes and teeth, heaps of mosasaur coprolites, i.e., fossil shit piles, and other indications that the lower, older rocks are Lower Cretaceous ocean basin-fill.
But up higher; we find mud cracks, rain prints, land turtle shells, land-snails (
Bellerophontid gastropods), and what may actually be a fossil feather. All indications of a more continental, i.e., fluvial (river), floodplain, lacustrine (lake), and paludal (swamp) deposition.
That’s my particular bailiwick.
I’m ‘elephant walking’ along the upper outcrops looking for fossils. You basically bend over at the waist and sweep from left to right as you take exaggerated step after step, scanning the ground looking for…well…it takes years, but once you see it, you never forget it.
“Fossil sign”.
A disjunct endemism. Something not
in situ. Something
out of place. A bit of a different, out of context color. Out of context texture. Out of context size. Out of context
context.
Something that looks like it shouldn’t ought to be there.
I’m picking up 1 cm. square hunks of what look like an ordinary rock. I taste them. Well, I stick them to my tongue. If it liquefies and runs away, it’s ordinary mudstone, shale, or the like.
If it sticks…well, it might just be fossil bone.
“PTWTWOO!”
“Damn right, Rock”, Cliff says from behind me, “Fucking North Korea tastes terrible.”
“Still, it’s the best way I know to…” I paused.
“Got something?” Cliff asked.
“Look here.” I said, “Anthill. Big, nasty buggers. Look around the edges. Pieces of flat, cream-colored rock on this gaudy purple stuff. Tongue test? They stick like cockleburs. Let’s look upslope, see if there’s a drainage…”
There it was, a nice little drainage incised about 1.5 meters deep into the nearly horizontal rocks we were walking on.
“Any float?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Cliff said.
We followed the weak, little drainage that was cut into the outcrop, up another couple of meters.
There were very scrappy, very small, very scattered pieces of that same cream-colored rock. Some were ornamented with a scroll-work or some sort of striations. Most un-geological. More biological. We followed the trail, up here, around here, over there.
Cliff noticed it first, a soccer-ball sized lump of completely out-of-place crème-colored ‘rock’ working its way out by gradual erosion of the variegated pastels of the continental rocks upon which we were treading.
I got there first and began to clear the area with my Estwing.
“Careful. Careful”, Cliff admonished.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mind your Mincies. [Mince pies = eyes]”, as I’m swinging away at the reluctant, reticent, rocks.
The excavation grew, slowly. From the rounded dome, we could see small sutures that had developed…
Then condyles, fenestrae, then more ‘bone’. Then a jaw, teeth, vertebrae…
“HOLY DOUBLE-DAMN SHIT!” I tootled my air horn. We needed the group to see this.
It was a skull. A dinosaur skull. A small, non-avian dinosaur skull.
Everyone has crowded around and looked at the small quarry we had just built.
“Whatcha got, Rock? Cliff?” Joon asked.
“Fuck me, but I think we’ve got us a dinosaur skull,” I said.
Professor Doctor Academician Ivan walked over and cleared the area.
As Professor Emeritus, he had pole position priority.
“I agree.” is all he said.
I cleared the area and let others take a whack at opening up the quarry.
We may have been low on power tools, but we had a surfeit of opinions.
“OK,” I said, “Let’s look at the facts…”
- Age? Cretaceous. Probably lower to lower-middle Cretaceous.
- Continental deposits. That’s very fine sand we’re hacking away. Fluvial, without a doubt. Or, possibly aeolian; there’s no such thing as a geological certainty. Dunes? Ephemeral creeks? Low floodplain? Geo-talk… .
- Small size. Potentially a juvenile?
- Nope. Not a juvie. Sutures are closed, fused. This is, well was, an adult; perhaps a subadult, given its size.
- In situ? In place? Or washed in?
Hard to tell when all you’ve exposed is half the critter’s brain box.
“Look at that!” Myung-dae exclaimed, “Squamosal bones and the inner parietals…temporal fenestrae. It had a frill; a small one.”
“OK,”, I said, looking closely at the exposed scrappy remains, “Fucking-A Bubba. Nailed it.” I said, giving him the thumbs up.
“Ceratopsian. Look at those greens-grinder molars. There’s some small osteoderms on the skull; knobby old bastard. Early critter.” I continued.
Others looked around and confirmed my observations.
“Reminds me of
Protoceratops from when I was back in Mongolia,” I said.
Dax chimed in with, “Looks something like
Psittacosaurus from back in the Cretaceous Belly River of Canada.”
Drs. Ivan and Morse agree. “Most assuredly. It is definitely proto-ceratopsian. Young adult, as Dr. Rock notes by the cranial sutures. Do they have a record of proto-ceratopsians here?”
Myung-dae replies, “I have read reports of Korean proto-ceratopsian found in South Korea. Not long ago, 2019, it is called…ah…
Auroraceratops. It is a genus of bipedal basal neo-ceratopsian dinosaur.”
“Bipedal?” I query. “Well, there’s a fine how do you do. All the proto-ceratopsians I’ve known were obligate quadrupeds.”
“Well”, Ivan, Dax, Cliff, and Morse agree, “That should give the shiny suit squad something to report. That’ll keep them the hell out of our hair for a while.”
We photograph each step as we excavate the critter. It’s more or less
in situ, buried where it fell. Probably killed by a sand slip off a dune, or a river sandbar slip and burial. It’s not complete, but we do have the skull and a good portion of the post-cranial elements to about just before the pelvis. A good pectoral girdle, skull, jaw, frill, forelimbs, forefeet…easily half-a cute little herbivorous dinosaur. About the size of a smallish Highland Coo or large Great Dane.
We flag it with the team particulars, it’s GPS position, and carefully rebury the animal. We don’t have any of the equipment nor time to excavate it properly, but we can conserve it. Of course, we’ll be informing the proper authorities of our discovery.
I have an absolutely ancient Polaroid instant camera. Before re-internment, I take several pictures of our “
Koreasaurus”, as we’ve dubbed the animal, with items for scale; like a hammer, cigar, and oddly enough, a photographic scale. Then I get a photo of the whole crew standing around, drinking warm beers from their individual day packs, smiling about the find ‘they‘ made.
We hear the melodious tootle of the bus’s horns. We make sure to pack out all our trash and wander back to our terrestrial transport.
“You were gone too long!” the chief shiny suited character goes all ballistic on me.
“Watch yourself, Herr Mac.”, I calmly said, “You’re going to burn your nose on my cigar.”
“You left without your handlers…err…guides!” he fumed.
“Hey, Scooter. Cool out. We’re geologists. We never get lost.” I said.
It sometimes just takes us longer to get back than it took us to leave…
“Your impertinence will be reported.” He smoldered.
“Report this, Mother Chuckler”, I observed and held out the pictures of our newly discovered
Koreasaurus.
“Show those photos to
your handlers,” I said in a mocking tone. “We found a brand new species of God-damned dinosaur for you geezers. It took us less than two hours. You can spin it that it’s a new, never-before-seen species of very specialized dinosaur found right here in beautiful Korea del Norte. Be quite the scientific coup, don’t you think? Trust us. We won’t say anything.”
He immediately shut up and went into conference with the rest of the shiny suit squad.
“Doctor”, one of the clan covert asked, “This is a new dinosaur?”
I had a thunderbolt of an idea.
“Oh! Yes, it is. I’d stake my reputation on it. You’ve had no concerted search here for the beasts and well, with the normalizing of relations between your country and the world, it allowed your specialists to perform real science. In fact, on the bus is the young North Korean geoscientist who made the discovery.” I said. “Give me a minute. I’ll go and get him. I think he was off taking a shi…ah, using the lavatory. Just give me a minute.”
I did have an idea. A wonderful idea. A wonderfully evil idea.
Back on the bus, I ordered the doors closed.
“Gentlemen! Ears and eyes! Please.” I said loudly.
Continuing…
“The shiny suits have their knickers all a-twist because we don’t want to listen to them; the assholes. Fuck that. I’ve got an idea. Let’s make our young acolyte here, Mr. Myung-dae Soo, a national hero. He would probably get his ass in a crack for sneaking on board the Western bus today the way he did. Well, double fuck that. Let’s all say
he found the dinosaur. Let him take the glory for the homeland. No one else will ever need to know.” I said smiling.
“Fuck Yeah! You bet! Замечательное! Ihmeellisiä! Maravilhoso! Geweldig!”
Good to know we’re all on the same page. Geologists. You can always count on them…
“Mr. Myung-dae Soo? Front and center. Time to go and become ‘Hero of Best Korea’.” I smiled.
He was absolutely terrified.
“Doctor…I …don't…wait…no…” he stammered.
Cliff, Dax, Ivan, and I trotted him out to confront the shiny suit squad.
“Don’t worry, Myung. We’ve got your back. Trust us.” I said in a low conspiratorial tone.
The shiny suit squad turned as one and gave Mr. Myung the Stink Eye treatment.
“Here you go. The man of the hour. Mr. Myung-Dae Soo, young geologist and up and coming paleontologist.” I say loudly and with the utmost honor.
They look at him and the Korean erupts in rapid-fire staccato bursts.
Cliff just wanders in and interjects, “Yes. Righto. Top form. Found the float. Tracked down that dino like he was on safari. Highest marks. Good man!”
Dax adds more fuel to the fire. “Like he knew where to go, knew where to look. He’s a natural.”
Dr. Academician Ivan blustered forth: “Excellent scholar. Excellent field man. Banner geologist.”
I couldn’t have added more. The shiny suit squad was gobsmacked.
I asked Myung-dae what they were saying.
“They were talking about reprisals. Reporting to authorities. Then, they stopped. You have them completely confounded.” He said.
“How so?” I asked, quietly.
“Between an international incident where we don’t listen to our handlers and this potential important scientific discovery.” Mr. Myung-dae reported, trying hard to parse the evolving situation.
“Yes”, I added to Ivan’s bluster.
To the shiny suits: “I’ve worked as visiting Dinosaurian Vertebrate Paleontology Curator at all the major American museums. This is a find quite unlike anything known. It is a watershed discovery. It will help unravel the evolution and distribution of the clan
Dinosauria for the whole Korean Peninsula. Perhaps, even with international impact on the recent finds in China.”
I laid it on with a trowel.
I hit all the buzzwords.
“Yes. Yes, perhaps.”, the head shiny-suiter said. “I will report this bit of very good news to the proper authorities. Myung-dae, with us. We require more information.”
“Ah, we’d prefer him to ride in back with us if you don’t mind. Scientific courtesy, old man. He needs to be classically de-interviewed after such a find.” I insisted, making certain I stand as tall, wide, and menacing as possible while smiling like a damned Cheshire cat, one smoking a very large cigar.
“Very well. We are not far from our evening stop. We can talk later.” He agreed.
We all moseyed, laughing silently, back to the bus; literally supporting our young hero Mr. Myung-dae as he seemed to have gone all wobbly of late.
Myung-dae was ashen-white. He looked like he had just given birth to a basketball. He was visibly shaking.
We get on the bus and I whip up a stout Yorshch for the young hero of the hour.
“Here! This is for you. If you’re going to be a world-class geologist, you’d damn sure better start acting like one.” I smile broadly.
There were hoots, cheers, and cat-calls.
Beers were popped, bottles uncorked; cigars, cigarettes, and pipes lit.
“Damn Skippy!” some anonymous reveler added.
Myung-dae slurped a good half the drink. I offered him a cigar. He stopped shaking enough to accept the novel offer.
Remember “crawlin’ home puker”? He’s taken his first step into a larger world.
OK, just to recap. Here are the
dramatis personae left on the bus…
Bus driver (Kim) and his relief (Won).
My team and I. That’s 11 Western geoscientists: Morse, Cliff, Volna, Ack, Viv, Graco, Erlen, Dr. Academician Ivan, Joon, Dax, and myself.
Then there are our guides: Yuk, No, Man, and Kong.
Our stowaway hero geologist-in-training: Myung-dae Soo, aka, “Mung”.
And the four members of the shiny suit clan: Pak, Mak, Tak, and Jak. At least, that’s the names we used when we addressed them.
The bus was rumbling down the deserted highway. We were headed more or less due east, passing the occasional Potemkin Village. They knew we cracked their code long ago, so they didn’t bother with darkening the windows any longer.
We are passing a series of highway road cut outcrops. We’re only going approximately 35 or 40 miles per hour. Suddenly, Morse jumps out of his seat and runs up to the driver.
“STOP! STOP! Back up! We almost missed it!” he barks in heavily Russian inflected English.
The driver, shaken to the core, just slams on the brakes. The bus grinds to a stop. Good thing there’s no traffic out here.
Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Jak of the suit clan jumps up and asks “What is the problem?”
“How could you miss that?” Morse shouts. “Huge fault. Mineralization. I saw that from a glimpse. We must return to investigate.”
“Is not possible. We have appointment at the hotel.” Jak replies.
“Fuck that!”, Morse shouts. I guess he’s just really into faults…
I wander up and try to defuse the situation.
“OK, guys, cool out. Let’s be reasonable. Do it our way. Go back to that road cut. We spend a half-hour there then we go on to the hotel. The hotel will still be there when we arrive, won’t it? Even if we’re a bit late?” I ask.
Jak looks to Pak, who converses with Mak and Tak. They know they’re outgunned.
The driver shifts the bus into reverse and we
back down the luckily deserted highway over a mile to the outcrop in question.
We had to admit, it was a mother beautiful normal fault. In perfect, textbook cross-section.
Morse and Joon were on it like white on rice; given the mineralization along the fault plane. All sorts of implications for the thermal and geological history of the area. But with just one exposure like this, more or less just a real interesting geo-oddity.
We spent precisely 30 minutes at the exposure, and when our handlers requested we re-board and head to the motel, we complied like nice, normal sort of folks.
I believe the appropriate maxim here is: “Lull them into a false sense of security…”
Once more down the road we travel. Beers popped, bottles uncorked; you know, the usual.
Forty-five minutes later, we pull into, I kid you not, a replica US of A 1950s
Motor-Inn.
“Mr. Myung”, I ask, “What the hell is this?”
To be continued… submitted by Riker is dealing and calls the game: 5 Card Stud, nothing wild.
The action we see in this hand mostly follows the (normal) rules of the game. It moves clockwise around the table and nobody seems to act out of turn or anything.
In fact, out of the now 5 Star Trek poker hands I've analyzed, I think all of them have either followed the rules, or contained minor and explainable discrepancies.
Since these 5 hands are actually a
significant amount of all the poker we ever see, it maybe turns out that it's something of a myth that Star Trek poker is silly and everybody is always breaking the rules. Lots of people play very badly in almost every hand, that's no myth, but with (I think) only about 3 or 4 possible hands that I could still look at, most of the ones I've analyzed don't significantly break the rules of the game, or when they do make relatively serious violations, they are pretty easily explained (often with the help of some great comments...it's not like I'm a poker pro! also I don't have much experience
playing 5 Card Stud cuz nobody plays it).
...
Here's the entire scene. Unlike other games we see, they seem to be playing
Limit 5 Card Stud here, where you can only bet or raise in specific limits. This is how 5 Card Stud is almost always played in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...although it's not a very popular game, unlike 7 Card Stud which is widely played and which I love).
Usually though we see them playing
No-Limit 5 Card Stud when they play this game. I had really never heard of that outside of Star Trek, and I explained why it's such a weird game in my first poker post, but I did look up NL 5 Card Stud and apparently some form of it is played in some real casinos in Norway or someplace. You can maybe find it but only in one tiny corner of Europe, and I think it's probably dealt differently.
The 5 Card Stud I know is dealt one card down and one face-up and then a round of betting, and then three more cards all face-up, one at a time with a round of betting after each deal, and this is the form (dealing and betting structure) which we always see when they play 5 Card Stud on Star Trek.
Apparently there are other forms -- "3 Down / 2 Up" is generally played No-Limit, so maybe that's what they play in Norway.
...
Anyway, because every raise we see in this hand is equal to the size of the initial bet on that round, and every bet is either 5 or 10 chips, it seems very unlikely that they are playing No-Limit and that every raise
just happens to be a minimum-sized raise, because that never happens on other hands we see them play. In a hand like this one Riker would usually put in a big raise on the end, maybe 100 chips, but because they're apparently playing Limit, 10 chips is the maximum he is allowed to raise.
The betting on this hand has an odd wrinkle though. Generally in Limit 5 Card Stud the betting limit would be a smaller bet on the first 2 rounds of betting, and double that amount on the latter 2 rounds, although this is very dependent on house rules, but betting limits
always increase throughout the hand (not every round betting though).
But on this hand: the first round of betting is in 5-chip increments, the second round it doubles to 10-chip increments, then on the third round it goes back down to 5-chip increments, and on the final round it's back to 10-chip increments.
This isn't totally insane or anything though, and because there are so many variations and house rules (
and this is a friendly home game for zero stakes) this is definitely not breaking any strict rules of the game. You can set the betting structure however you like.
We could surmise that they're playing with their own house rules, and maybe the first person to bet on each round is allowed to open for
either 5 or 10 chips, depending on what they choose, and everybody else has to follow. Or maybe if somebody bets 5 you're allowed to raise 5
or 10 if you want (although we don't see anybody do the latter), but it's pretty clear that they can only bet in increments of 5 or 10, so it's a basic type of Limit betting.
Pots can still build up pretty big -- this pot gets relatively big without a single re-raise and only a couple of players by the end -- but you're not gonna have dramatic all-ins in Limit betting structures. It's also MUCH harder to bluff in Limit games because you can only bet in relatively small limits, so opponents will tend to be getting very good odds to call just 1 more bet at the end, if there has been some action along the way.
...
I'll list the action as well as Data and Riker's cards, because theirs are the only cards we ever see. We don't see them as they are being dealt but it's clear when we do see them that they are laid out in the order in which they were dealt.
I am not yet listing anybody's hole card (hidden card), just the ones we see on the table.
Pulaski: ? (must be Q, K, or A)
La Forge: ?
Data: Q♣
O'Brien: ?
Riker: 10♥
Action: Pulaski bets 5, everybody calls.
Notes: Again there are different rules regarding antes and who acts first, but whenever we see them play stud, the strongest hand showing has the first option to check or bet. This is almost always how the game is played, BUT another semi-common rule is a "bring-in" on just the first round. A bring-in is where the
lowest card showing is required to act first and to make at least a minimum-sized bet to basically get the action started (this is only ever on the first round). But for a number of reasons -- mainly that I don't think we ever see them do this -- I doubt they're playing this way.
This is all to explain why Pulaski must be showing a Queen, King, or Ace in order for the action to start with her, because we know Data has a Queen. It's very likely she was dealt a King or an Ace because Data ends up with 3 Queens at the end so she would have needed to have the last Queen in the deck. Compared to that 1 Queen, there are 7 Aces and Kings that we never see during this hand, so she's obviously much more likely to have one of those. It's not really relevant cuz she's about to fold, but for the sake of being as complete as possible I believe the action would still be following the rules here if she
was showing a Queen. In that case Pulaski and Data would each be showing the same highest hand (one Queen), and I believe that the first action would then start with whoever is closer to the dealer's left, which is Pulaski here. So she
could have a Queen. But she probably has a King or an Ace, giving her the highest card showing.
Unless she has real trash like K-4 offsuit it's very sensible of her to bet here. Just because it's hard to bluff in Limit games doesn't mean every hand gets to showdown...it just means that once the pot starts to get bigger it's harder to bluff. But people may drop out along the way, and she could have everybody folding by third or fourth street if she continues to show the strongest hand and bets it the whole way. When she bets here she's taking the lead and saying that she
doesn't have K-4 garbage. It's unlikely she already has a huge pair, but 2 high cards are a very strong start in 5 Card Stud, a game where 1 pair very often wins at showdown.
Compare this to the hand where Crusher outplayed Riker. Worf got dealt an Ace on the first round that hand and he checked, and it checked around. That was because Worf is bad at poker -- he wasn't being sneaky. He stayed in that hand until finally folding on the last card despite showing only an Ace and a bunch of garbage (in a hand where Dr. Crusher had a board of Q-Q on third street, like Data here).
Pulaski is good at poker, and even though we never see any of her cards this hand, she seems to play it well.
...
Next round:
Pulaski: ?, ?
La Forge: ?, ?
Data: Q♣, Q♦
O'Brien: ?, ?
Riker: 10♥, J♥
Action: Data bets 10, O'Brien calls, Riker calls, Pulaski folds, La Forge folds.
Notes: I have no idea what any of
Geordi's cards are but this is still probably the single best play we ever see him make in any poker game. Most of the time he's
terrible, but here he at least finds an early fold, instead of chasing his pipe dream of a hand and paying chips on every round just to fold when he inevitably misses his miracle at the end.
I mean this is probably an extremely trivial decision for Geordi. Data is showing Q-Q so if Geordi doesn't have a big draw brewing, or an Ace or King in the hole (trying to improve to a higher pair), or a pair of some kind by now, it's a 100% fold and there's nothing to even think about. Geordi probably has absolute garbage like 9-8-3 with no flush draw so it's the easiest fold ever, but still, at least it's one hand where he folded his losing hand early, saving himself some chips..
Pulaski also finds a fold here, despite showing (very probably) a King or an Ace. She obviously doesn't have a monster hand like a pair of Aces or Kings cuz she'd play that, but even most legitimately strong starting hands that she might have opened with last round are now
huge underdogs once Data pairs his Queen. Pulaski could have had A-9, or K-J, or similar. But this last card pretty obviously didn't help her (since she folds), and most of the time she will be way behind Q-Q. Also, because her Ace or King is face-up (and the rest of the cards in this game are all dealt face-up) everyone at the table will see if she pairs it. And again, because it's Limit, she can't put in a huge raise at any point and try to buy the pot with a bluff.
I'm just contrasting this to Geordi and Worf, both of whom would probably call off chips for another round or two in Pulaski's shoes, just cuz they have an Ace or whatever and they're feeling lucky.
...
Next round:
Data: Q♣, Q♦, A♥
O'Brien: ?, ?, ?
Riker: 10♥, J♥, 5♥
Action: Data bets 5, O'Brien calls, Riker raises 5 more to 10 total, Data calls, O'Brien folds.
Notes: Riker's play is really bad/strange but I have to start with
O'Brien because I
think this is the only time we see him playing poker and this is one of the worst folds I've ever seen. In real or fictional poker.
Let's assume the ante was 5 chips (that's obviously the minimum bet so it makes sense it would also be the ante -- and there's no way the ante is
less than that). So let's count how many chips are in the pot: 5 chips from all 5 people as antes (+25); another 5 from everybody on the first round of betting (+25); a bet of 10 and two calls on the next round (+30), and on this round Data has put in 10 total, O'Brien has put in 5 so far, and Riker has put in 10 total (+25). Adding those up, 25+25+30+25=105. So there are 105 chips in the pot after Data's call, and the action is on O'Brien, who owes 5 chips.
So to potentially win 105 chips will cost him 5 chips. 105/5 simplifies to 21/1, so those are the odds he's getting here to call 5 more chips. 21 to 1 odds. That means he has to win this pot once every 22 times for it to be an even-money call.
If he calls and loses this hand 95% of the time it would still be a slightly profitable call (better than even-money)!!! He'd have to lose this hand about 96% of the time for a call to be a mistake...and even then it's a small mistake cuz the direct odds aren't far off from that!
Of course there's no reason to waste 5 chips if he can't ever win...BUT HE ALREADY CALLED 5 CHIPS ON THIS ROUND OF BETTING! Then Riker raised 5 more behind him, and importantly Data just called that raise. That means that O'Brien will be closing the action on this round of betting, (unless he raises). If Data had re-raised Riker then O'Brien could reasonably fold as the bet would be 10 to him instead of 5,
and he wouldn't be closing the action. Riker could raise again behind him, and Data could raise again behind that! In Limit games the amount of bets are usually capped at around 5 or 6 bets/raises per round -- Data and Riker couldn't just keep raising each other 5 chips forever, it would be capped. But that's irrelevant here because Data did NOT re-raise Riker, so O'Brien can close the action with a call of just 5 chips.
Literally anything that was worth calling 5 chips for is worth calling another 5 chips for here especially because his call will close the action AND because there's 1 card to come! Unless he's drawing dead to a pair of Queens (which Riker actually is...but he's hoping to bluff), he has to call. He's getting 21 to 1 odds!!! If he was already dead to a pair of Queens, his call of Data's 5 chip bet can only be described as accidental.
Again,
without knowing ANY of his cards I can easily say this is the worst fold I've seen on Star Trek. Either O'Brien lacks the most rudimentary understanding of what "odds" are, or he misread his own hand.
YOU'RE GETTING 21 TO 1, MILES. If you have any pair you can easily make a winning trips or two pair on the last card
five freaking percent of the time. (Note: If Miles did have just one-pair below Queens here he would in fact be drawing dead to Data, but only in this specific instance because Data
happens to have a third Queen in the hole. Nobody except Data knows that, and it's
very rare that Data would have three Queens here. As far as O'Brien knows, any hand he has with a pair in it would be live against Data (and certainly live against Riker, who I'll get to in a second), and Data usually won't even make as much as two pair by the end, let alone trips.)
Misreading your own hand and putting in chips when you should have folded, and then finally folding once you realize which cards you actually have, is deeply humiliating and terrible...and that's honestly his
best-case scenario for this fold to be sensible.
I think that scenario is unlikely, and it's vastly more likely that O'Brien is simply awful at poker.
Time to pluck a pigeon is right.
Riker can only make a flush
or pretend he made a flush if he catches another heart, which is unlikely. If Riker catches a non-heart 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, or 9 then it's
open information to everybody that his hand can never beat Data's one pair of Queens! Riker's ONLY PLAY if he catches any of those cards (because they can't make him two pair or trips) is to fold. That set of cards I listed is 21 different cards (3 of each suit from each) . If Riker lands any of those 21 cards his hand might as well be auto-folded by the dealer. His best possible hand would be J-J and this would be open information. Most of the other cards in the deck would also give Riker
at best three of a kind (lower than Queens), but if he had trips or two pair it would certainly be worth a showdown against Data, who will usually have just the 1 pair of Queens he's showing.
...
I covered this in the first hand I analyzed, but Riker is out of his mind here a little bit.
Riker lands a third heart on the board and raises Data, who is showing a pair of Queens. Riker isn't there yet. He can't have a pair better than Jacks, he can't have more than 1 pair, but anyway he's not worried about pairs -- he's posturing that he has 4 hearts, giving him a flush draw.
Data should have re-raised him (in which case O'Brien's call-fold could be maybe reasonable). By far Riker's best chance of winning this hand at showdown would be if he had a legit flush draw here. That would give him 8 outs (as far as he knows).
Starting with 13 hearts in the deck subtract the 4 hearts Riker is presumably holding, and 1 more because Data is showing the A♥.
We can't know what other cards they've seen from Pulaski and Geordi and Miles before they folded, so we're looking at it based on the facts we know. If Riker had a flush draw he'd have 8 outs and there are 45 unknown cards to him/us -- starting with 52, subtract Riker's 4 "hearts," and the 3 cards Data is showing. 52-4-3=45. And 8 of those 45 cards win him the hand, so his chances of getting a heart are 8/45, or about 18%. In reality there are only 7 hearts he can catch, because Data's hole card is the Q♥.
Either way he should not raise Data here. It's not bluffing time yet...a flush draw with 1 card to come is
openly a bad hand here against 1 pair! In 5 Card Stud we can see that he can't have any kind of multi-way draw. He can't have a pair
and a flush draw, and we can see he can't have a straight draw along with his flush draw. Because his highest card showing is a Jack,
every possible hole card he could have in the entire deck makes him a massive underdog to Q-Q with one card to come.
This is open information and a clear mistake by Data. The only reason NOT to re-raise is if he thinks another raise will scare off O'Brien, and because Data has a huge hand (three Queens) he wants to bleed O'Brien
and Riker on fifth street.
I think that's unlikely to have been Data's strategy though. He's brand new and perhaps deeply concentrating on the wrong things at this stage, and I think this is just a mistake.
...
Last card
[NOTE: I am showing their hole card in brackets here]
Data: [Q♥], Q♣, Q♦, A♥, 4♦
Riker: [2♠],10♥ ,J♥ ,5♥ ,4♥
Action: Data bets 10, Riker raises 10 more to 20, Data folds.
Notes: We can see now that
Data's hole card is the Q♥ because we see him looking at it. When you think about it, it seems irrelevant that he looks at his hole card here while making his decision -- if Riker doesn't have a flush, his
best possible hand is one pair of Jacks. Data's hole card in fact gives him
his strongest possible hand here -- three Queens.
But that makes no difference! No hole card could give him anything that could beat a flush here. Either Riker has a flush, or Data's board beats him, with one pair of Queens. Data's hole card doesn't matter, except...
While it doesn't matter at all that Data's hole card is another Queen, it
does matter that it's a heart. Data is making some bizarre rudimentary mistakes since it is his first hand, but that doesn't mean he isn't also employing some not-awful strategic thinking here.
(Notation) ...
As far as Data's play here, in Limit games your choices are really distilled, and facing just one opponent you will essentially always be making 2 choices at once because there are so few options. If your opponent bets or raises, you already know exactly how much they will bet, so decisions sort of come in pairs. Hopefully the following makes clear what I mean:
Data, or anybody acting first here and facing one opponent, has exactly 6 different "lines" or series of actions he or she can take. Each of these lines represents what Data could do
ONLY if/when his opponent bets or raises him. If his opponent does not bet or raise him, his second planned-action doesn't matter cuz the hand is already over before then.
So in between each pair of actions, it is assumed that Riker has bet or raised.
These are the 6 lines Data could take, acting first:
- Check-Fold [to be clear, in this instance the action describes Data checking, Riker betting (not listed), and Data folding to Riker's bet]
- Check-Call
- Check-Raise
- Bet-Fold
- Bet-Call
- Bet-Re-raise
Again, each of those pairs are
Data's possible actions here, and the second action is only required if Riker bets or raises. Generally a person makes these pairs of decisions really as one decision,
especially in Limit games where you absolutely know how much your opponent's bet will be.
Of the 6 possible ways Data could have played this hand at the end, I think Bet-Fold is probably the very worst. Check-Fold is also an extremely weak play, but at least saves him 10 chips I guess.
Data has to see a showdown here.
For the same price as it cost him to eventually fold here (10 chips), he could have seen a showdown if he'd gone Check-Call! And I would say that Check-Call is probably Data's best line here. If he was more used to the game and Riker's tendencies
and he thought it was more likely than not that Riker was bluffing here, he might Bet-Call or even Check-Raise, each of which would get more money out of Riker (but also be risking more, if Riker actually does habe a flush).
There were 105 chips in the pot after the last round of betting. Here Data bets 10, and Riker raises him 10 more to 20. So from 105 we add Data's 10 and Riker's 20 to the pot. That means there are now 135 chips in the pot, and it costs Data 10 chips to call. If he calls (or folds), he's closing the action. So he can absolutely see a showdown here for 10 more chips, nobody can raise behind him. So he's getting 13.5 to 1 odds that Riker is bluffing. Insta-call. At 13.5 to 1, that means Data is making money with a call if Riker is bluffing at least 7% of the time here.
In other words, if Riker has a flush 93% of the time here -- meaning Data loses 93% of the time when he calls -- it's still a slightly profitable call because he's getting such enormous odds!
Data has to call, maybe half-resigned to losing...but if he's even
heard of bluffing -- a term which is often used outside of poker and with which he MUST be familiar in the context of intergalactic diplomacy, aggression, wars, etc. -- he should know Riker is bluffing at least 1/14th of the time. Note: that's not one-quarter of the time, it's one-fourteenth of the time.
But Data's fold isn't really his biggest mistake though. He played this last round of betting completely thoughtlessly. He forgot basic logic. But this isn't a Gotcha! Star Trek Mistake -- I'm going to try to explain it.
I'd say it's probably because he's simply never
been exposed to this particular sort of logic or strategy in regards to games, and he doesn't always make the logical or verbal connections that we think he should. For example, his ongoing difficulty with idioms is puzzling -- hasn't he read, like, a LOT of human literature?
He plays plenty of chess and while you can
sort of bluff in chess, there is also obviously no hidden information. You can't openly lie in chess, the closest you can do is misdirection and even that obviously isn't at the heart of chess strategy.
Anyway maybe I'm being harsh on a newcomer, but Data's whole action here on the last round is bad. Why is he leading out for 10 chips if he's going to fold to a raise???
That is his real mistake.
Riker will literally never, ever, ever, ever,
ever just call him. If Riker has a flush, Data cannot beat it and this is open information. With just 1 hole card, Data's best possible hand here is three Queens (which he happens to have). He can never have a full house or anything else that can beat a flush -- it's impossible with just 1 hole card. And because Riker's highest card showing is a Jack, it's also open information that if he does not in fact have a flush, he cannot possibly beat Data's one pair of Queens that are showing.
Data leading out for 10 chips here is awful, if he's folding to a raise. You can't bet/fold that...you just can't. What was the purpose of Data's 10 chip bet? It's certainly not a bluff, but it's also not a value bet because Riker cannot ever have a hand like a pair of Kings -- something he might call with (which could beat Data's board but might not be the winning hand, since Data could have two pair or three Queens). Riker also cannot have two pair. He either has a flush or he's losing to Q-Q, and again this is all open information.
Since Riker will never ever call, it is impossible for Data to make a value bet. The
only possible value his bet has is if he thinks it will induce Riker to bluff more chips.
...
This is very similar to the hand where Dr. Crusher was showing Q-Q and Riker was trying to bluff her. It was the same thing -- either Riker had a flush, which would 100% be the best hand, but if he didn't have a flush he couldn't possibly beat Crusher's Q-Q on the board. In that hand, on the final round of betting, she bet, other people folded, Riker raised big,
Crusher re-raised, Riker re-raised even bigger, and she called. She HAD TO CALL, because just like this hand when she re-raised him it's impossible for it to be a value raise, because he is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever just calling. Her opening bet on that hand was maybe to see what everybody else (Data and Worf) might also do, but when it's down to her and Riker she
cannot make a value bet. Just like Data's bet of 10 chips here -- it is logically impossible for it to be a value bet. Quite literally the only value it has is that it may induce Riker to bluff off more chips. So when he does, she has to call, just like Data has to call Riker's raise here.
Data should bet-call or check-call at the end here. I mean, a (very bad) argument could be made for check-folding...but bet-folding is illogical.
Fortunately Data's not a Vulcan, and I think it's fairly normal for him to make oddly simple mistakes when first encountering or trying something. Data learns
extremely quickly, but often is pretty 'dumb' to things that one would think should be obvious to him (like idioms). Even after reading volumes of writings about a subject he often won't really "get it" until he experiences it and/or discusses it with somebody who can answer his questions. I think this tendency can explain why he made
such bad decisions here, on fourth and fifth street, but really especially at the end (fifth street). He just didn't "get it" yet.
...
Note that Riker didn't have to show his bluff, since everybody folded. But he wanted Data to learn the strategy of the game, and this one hand seemed to have a major impact on Data's understanding of poker strategy.
Also, even though it's a really bad fold by Data, I guess I don't hate the raise from Riker. His main problem is that he's playing 10-2 offsuit. The
only way he could win this particular hand was to bluff if he caught some hearts, so if he folds now after he catches a miracle scary board then he's really never getting any kind of value from this.
If you're gonna play absolute garbage then you're gonna have to bluff a lot -- or else lose a lot -- cuz you're gonna have the worst hand a lot.
And Riker knows Data is brand new to the game, and Data just gave a little speech about how simple the game is but didn't mention bluffing. And it only costs Riker 20 chips here to make a raise which Data may read as strong.
Riker's raise at the end I guess is correct...but I completely hate the way he played himself into this mess. He should have folded on the first round of betting. He also should have folded on the second round of betting. On the third round of betting I guess by now he might as well keep going and try to catch a bluffable card, although I don't like his raise.
Here on the end when he actually catches a bluffable card he's gotta go for it, otherwise why even bother staying in?? He's never going to make the actual best hand here, with the offsuit 2 in the hole.
...
(Notation) Data's Q♥ in the hole is one less heart in the deck that Riker could have as his hole card. If Riker is sometimes bluffing and sometimes has it, then Data having a heart as his hole card makes it a bit more likely that this is one of the times Riker's bluffing. There are still a number of cards Riker could be holding that would give him a flush, but he can't have the Q♥.
"Card removal" -- adjusting your idea of your opponent's range of likely hands based on the hidden card(s) that
you have which block hands could have had -- comes more into play in other poker games, but it's not irrelevant here.
As it was Data's first time playing I'm not sure he was considering that his hole card had zero actual value to his hand at this point other than card removal adjustment of how likely it is that Riker's bluffing. I wouldn't say it's impossible that Data is considering this because, again, that's the
only reason for Data to care what his hole card is. It's open information to everyone that Data's hole card is irrelevant...
except for the purpose of looking at card removal. But that shouldn't really have much effect on Data's decision here anyway, since all he knows is that there's 1 less unknown heart. Changes it from 8 hole cards Riker would win with to 7.
And of course having a heart in the hole should make Data a little
more likely to call, which he doesn't, but maybe he was in fact considering how much that 1 card mattered, it just didn't sway his (very bad) decision to fold. It shouldn't have even been a part of the decision, but maybe he was paying too much attention to certain minor things like that because he was so new to the game. It's the
only reason for him to look at his hole card here (other than to "play dumb" like in the hand with Neelix, but Data is not doing that here).
...
Card removal can really come into play in Texas Hold'em and can get pretty interesting. Say you have Q♥Q♠ and you see a flop against 1 opponent, after making a big re-raise with your Queens before the flop. The flop is 10♥ 5♥ 2♠, and let's say there are some big bets back and forth and then your opponent goes all-in..
Based everything going on, (your knowledge of the player, the action pre-flop and on the flop, and maybe you're deep in a big tournament and you have more chips than them, etc. etc.) let's say you're pretty certain your opponent is not on a pure bluff. You think they probably have a very big hand or big draw. You
want them to have a flush draw if you're going to call, because you're getting good odds to call if they do have a flush draw a lot of the time. But iff they have a very big hand on that flop and it's
not a flush draw, then it's probably better than Q-Q
There's a straight draw on that board with 4-3, but your opponent wouldn't have played 4-3 pre-flop here, so what flush draws can they have based on the pre-flop action? Definitely A♥K♥ or A♥Q♥, very probably A♥J♥ and K♥Q♥ , and maybe Q♥J♥ . Based on everything (pre-flop action, etc.) you doubt they'd have something like 8♥7♥ , or A♥9♥ . They might have played A♥10♥ pre-flop but the 10♥ is on the board so they can't have that.
So really there are 5 flush draws that you think they could probably have (A-K, A-Q, A-J, K-Q, Q-J). But because one of your Queens happens to be hearts, you can eliminate three of those holdings as impossible.
That might not seem like a big deal but it actually is (in certain hands).
Your opponent would probably play this hand exactly like this if they had A-A and K-K, and those become more likely because you can eliminate a lot of flush draws. Your opponent could also have 10-10 which means they flopped three 10s and have you crushed. If 5-5 is in their pre-flop range, that also has you crushed, with a third 5 on the board. Maybe they have J-J or exactly the other two Queens in the deck, but most of their likely non-flush-draw holdings would seem to be way way ahead of you.
Maybe, depending on all sorts of things (like how much of your chip stack you'd be risking, if it's a tournament or cash game, etc), if you had Q♦Q♠ instead of a heart you might have leaned toward calling, since the other possible flush draws with the Q♥ would be "live" in your opponent's range, making it X% more likely they have a flush draw, so X% less likely they have three of a kind or K-K or A-A.
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