What makes poker so fascinating, apart from the money of course, is the many kinds of people you meet along the way: the amateurs, the pros, the Jews, the Muslims, the whites, the Asians, the blacks, the halt, the lame, the ill-tempered, the drunk, the hugely fat, the oppressively body-odored, or even the incredibly gorgeous, witty, cosmopolitan female poker players with hearts of gold and bankrolls to match. (OK, I haven't met anyone fitting that last particular description yet, but if that sounds like you, please send a photograph, bank statement, and home address so I can confirm it.) All of these people have wildly different ideas about how to play and what they're playing for, whether it's money, prestige, to kill boredom, or simply to give tight, young know-it-all white guys bad beats.
And if you've played any poker at all, you know that any group of ten poker players is going feature ten different personalities -- or more, depending on the state of everyone's mental health. But when you find yourself sitting at a wild game with endless (and seemingly pointless) raises and re-raises, it's easy to look at the players uniformly and decide they're all just maniacs.
In my years at the tables, I've learned that there are different types of maniacs, with varying styles and holes in their games. Once I recognized this, I saw the problem with the proscriptive approach in Sklansky's Hold'em for Advanced Players. To make the most out of a wild hold'em game, you must be able to recognize the maniacs you're up against and play accordingly. So let's take a look at the typical cast of misfits, paying special attention to which strategies you should use to deal with them.
The Cast of Characters
The faces may change from game to game, but the personalities you'll encounter at the table remain remarkably consistent.
The Drunk
The best way to recognize this guy (or very, very rarely, gal) is that he's, well, drunk. If you're close enough, you can smell it on him. And you may notice that his skin has turned quite red. He'll slur his words and think a lot of things are funny -- until he (inevitably) starts losing. When playing a drunk, keep in mind that they get tunnel vision. They are not thinking about you at all. They do not care what you have. This is not the place for the fancy check-raise bluff you're so proud of. You are going to get called pretty much no matter what. Also, as you take the drunk guy's money, try to be as nice about it as you can. "Stuck and steaming" gets multiplied by a factor of five when booze is stirred into the mix, and a baseball bat upside your head can give new meaning to the term "bad beat."
The Steamer
This is a guy who, having taken a bad beat or two, will start flying off the handle and calling with any hand. This player is trickier than your average idiot because he might be a good player when he's winning. Somewhere in his poker DNA lives the dim memory of what it's like to play good poker, and those reflexive abilities can kick in at any time. So you must observe him closely to see if and when he goes off tilt. While he's on tilt, you've got to call him down because he's going to try to run you over. And here I would separate people who go off tilt into two different categories.
There's the beaten dog, who will simply call all the way to the river with any kind of draw or underpair, then fold when you bet. Obviously, you must bet against this player even if you're holding the most marginal of hands. For example, if you're heads-up after the flop with J-10 and the flop comes K-10-3, go ahead and bet. If you don't get raised right there, you're going to win the pot most of the time, and you should keep betting all the way up to and including the river, unless and until you are raised. This last point is not that divergent from the teachings of Sklansky, especially since, in this example, you are up against a weak, passive opponent. But in the kind of games I play in, you're going to have to defend your J-10 preflop in ways Sklansky doesn't approve of if you want to make any kind of move on the flop.
The second category of steamer is the guy who feels like his own chips are the enemy. This happens to players who start off aggressive and, once they take a few bad beats, escalate to rabid pit bulls. You have to be very careful here, but you also have to be very bold. Just keep playing back at this kind of steamer with any kind of hand. Most of the time you'll win. But even people on tilt are allowed to have aces, and sometimes you will lose the maximum when you go over the top of a very aggressive, very mad player. But if you want to play in a game with maniacs, you must be able to weather the loss without going on tilt yourself.
The Filthy Rich
You never really know if someone's really wealthy just by what they tell you at the table. But one guy I played against a few months ago, "Yves" as I'll call him, was a charming, middle-aged guy from Monaco. Everyone said he was rich and I believed them. (Besides, do they have housing projects in Monaco?)
I tended to believe the rich rumors because the last night I played Yves, he told me he was going to have to leave in about a half an hour to go out to dinner with his girlfriend. We were playing 10-20, and he had around three hundred dollars in front of him. Well he began raising the pot at every opportunity, virtually never folding. Why? He wanted to lose all his chips quickly so he would be "allowed" to leave and then make his dinner date on time. He could have just cashed out, but since the money made so little difference to him, what was the point? In the end, he wound up sprinting to the cage and standing there impatiently, annoyed that he had to wait for them to hand him his cash.
Although I genuinely liked Yves, I felt bad for not having taken every single chip he had. I just didn't catch enough cards in the short amount of time he had to blow off his chips, and I didn't want to get swept up in his chip-unloading mania (which, gentle readers, can happen, and can be a huge liability).
When you meet a player like this, someone who's maybe midway between the two types of Steamers noted above, you want to play much as you would against the nose-open tilt machines. You want to be aggressive, and you want to use your new rich friend as a springboard to force other people out of the pot and isolate him. Unless you're heads-up with the rich guy and are looking to slow play a big hand, you need to be raising if you're going up against him, even with second pair or possibly just a big ace that missed the flop (but you should absolutely NOT be bluffing against this guy for what I hope are obvious reasons).
By the way, you should always keep in mind that maniacal players' stacks will rise and fall like waves, and sometimes they'll decide to leave when they're winning. When they do this, do not snarl after them, "Thanks for the lessons." If you do, you are both a dimwit and a churl. Say, rather, "Nice playing with you. Good hit."
Captain Testosterone
This kind of player will try to muscle you out of a pot with nothing if he senses even the slightest weakness in you -- and Captain Testosterone generally considers calling a weakness. This guy (it's almost always a guy) is one of the tougher maniacs to play against because he uses the chips to intimidate you. This means that you'll be guessing what he has most of the time. But remember: more than half the time he has the option to, the Captain will be raising you, and if you're in there with him and catch any part of it, you have to play back at him, much as you would the Steamer who's trying to go broke as fast as possible. Keep in mind, too, that a lot of times Captain Testosterones are more hat than cattle. If you play back at them once and they don't have the goods, they'll often simmer down. Then you know you have them. And if you don't feel you're strong enough to raise, you have to call them all the way down, sometimes with as little as ace high, because the chances that they're bluffing are just too good.
The Randomizer
The Randomizer is also tough to play because you never know if he has any idea what he's doing. A canny lawyer friend of mine named "Sherm" was playing in a pot-limit hold'em game the other night, and had an opportunity to get a guy right where he wanted him. Sherm had As Ks and flopped 4-8-J, all spades. Sherm managed to make a guy he'd never seen before go all in on the flop. Turn was a 6s, and after the river came a rag, Sherm turned his hand over: "Ace-high flush." The young man he was playing against hemmed and hawed and said, "I have a ... watchamacallit." You guessed it: 5-7 of spades. Turned out he had a straight flush (of which he was only barely aware), and had just busted Sherm right out of the game. Sherm lost his taste for pot limit that night and moved over to join us in our limit game. But, as he told me later, he didn't feel he'd actually lost the money. As Sherm put it, "I let him hold it for a while, and then he repaid it a little bit at a time."
It's hard to put the Randomizer on a hand because he can't even put himself on a hand. So, when playing against the Randomizer, you have to pretend that you're in the pot by yourself but, at the end of the hand, the dealer is going to turn over the next two cards off the deck and you have to beat them. Here you're going to need a good general sense of odds. If you have A-Q and didn't make a pair, will you still be beating those two random cards? These are the decisions you'll have to make.
Jason versus Freddy
Sometimes two players will, for whatever reason, start their own personal Vietnam right there at the poker table. If they're aggressive to begin with, and they have a finely tuned bullshit detector, they'll go back and forth, bluffing and rebluffing. Getting caught with a mediocre hand between two dueling maniacs can be trying because one of them may actually be telling the truth. (Repeat this to yourself at least once a week: even maniacs are allowed to have aces.) Here you have to have a sense of how smart these two are. Unfortunately, often the answer is "very" -- they've each read each other correctly and are playing accordingly. And, too bad for you, the play is spiraling out of control.
It's like the difference between a low limit Omaha game and a high-limit one. In low-limit, you're running into the nuts with numbing regularity and it's difficult to bluff, so Sklansky style fits right in. In the higher limits, people play what would be considered very unconventional in the lower limits -- we're talking trash hands -- so often you don't know where you are. And, as Paul Newman said in the Color of Money, you don't want to be the guy who's guessing; you want to be the unknown.
One nice move to consider if you find yourself sandwiched between Freddy and Jason: if you have a good hand, just limp along and let them raise and reraise each other. This is a personal duel of wills between two wild players, so let them continue to think that it's only them in the pot. Then show them top pair big kicker, which is often enough. Or if you have a hand that's good but perhaps a little fragile (say you have two pair on a flop with three spades), use one of the maniacs as a springboard: the first maniac raises and you reraise the calmer of the two maniacs, hoping to isolate the first one with your two pair in case the guy you're trying to knock out has the four of spades or some similar holding and is waiting to make the 17th nut flush on the river. (Think it doesn't happen? You've been reading too much Sklansky.)
So, what to do when you're up against a table of all these personalities? Especially if you find more than one personality overlapping in each player?
Sic Sklansky on Them
Now for the Master Class: what to do when everyone at the able is a raving, foam-at the mouth lunatic and every other pot is at least seven people and at least three bets.
Paradoxically, this is where Sklansky can help you. When you're up against maniacs, play strong hands, but not all of them. For example, a hand like A-Q off goes way down in value in a field like this. Why? Because (and here is the secret that is going to earn you so much money it sickens me to include it here) the maniacs are often calling with something. Not much, just ... something.
For example, a maniac sees a hand like A-9 of clubs and thinks he's got a monster. Hell, he's played a lot worse, right? So he raises with it. Now at this point, you're crushing the maniac with your A-Q. But when six other people call, suddenly you're drawing almost dead. Thus a hand like 3-4 suited can go up tremendously in value because, most of the time, the majority of the hands will be congregated at the higher end of the deck, leaving your cards live. Same goes if the flop should come A-K-8 rainbow. When you have the 3-4, you can easily chuck it in the muck. And that, as you should know, can save you mucho dinero in the long run.
Think of how much money you've wasted on pocket Kings when an ace hits the flop and you call all the way down to the river, knowing you're beat, because ... why? (Well, that's a whole 'nother article.) And you avoid the situation where, say, you've called with J-10 off and you flop a jack but you don't know if you've flopped the best Jack, and it's going to cost you a couple stacks of chips to find out. Which brings me to another point: know thy bankroll.
You've just got to remember that if people are raising every street, a 10-20 game can start to look like a 20-40 game in a real hurry. So the five hundred bucks you brought might be gone inside a half an hour, easy. You should be alert to the possibility that if you're at all willing to get in there and mix it up, on a baddish night you could lose two grand in this 10-20 game. And again, if you want to "Sklansky Up" and wait for the nuts here, some of the smarter maniacs will read you, and every time little cards flop they will bet at you and raise you, trying to test you. You don't want this. You want them to be uncertain. You want them to check.
Some people have tried to tell me that when playing the Sklansky way in these games, the "best" course of action is to tighten way up. It's hard for me to articulate how insanely weak I think that approach is. Can you make money at it? Sure. I live in New York City, and often I'll see people sitting on the sidewalk, begging for change. That approach to making money is even better than playing tight as a rock in a very loose game -- unlike poker, at least you never lose money that way. Beg for change long enough and you could earn a million dollars, but it's going to take about a million years. And that's exactly how I feel about waiting for the nuts in a game full of wack-jobs: you'll make money (if you can stand the alarming swings you're going to get on your bankroll, regardless of how tight you are), but accumulating chips will be like watching a glacier melt. Is that really why you're at the table?
Whatever guru you decide to follow, though, always, always, always check the advice you get from books (and from me, and from this website) against what you've learned in the real world. And don't forget: you don't win money from players in books or spiffy computer simulations, you win it from people. So look, listen, and remember.
I'd like to make one last point perfectly clear: I do not for a second contest the fact that David Sklansky is a very bright guy with a lot to offer. His articulation of the concept of semi-bluffing, which was brand new to me at the time I read him, was worth the outrageously inflated price of the cheap paperback all by itself. But I submit to you, the poker community, that when Sklansky suggests that hands like pocket 7's and Axs be played the same way in the same position, he's failing his readers. Those are two very, very different hands and must be played as such. I mean, my God, an entire chapter could be written about what to do with those two hands alone.
Ultimately, the whole concept of grouping hands in the Sklansky manner is useless at best and at worst quite costly. And the book is filled with that kind of potentially expensive information. The idea, for example, that you should throw away K-Q suited for one raise is utter, lunatic insanity. No one ever does this, nor should they. And if, miraculously, there was a game so tight that you knew you were drawing slim with a K-Qs versus a raise from some moss-covered rock to your right, then why, oh why, would you ever want to play in that game? You'd be lucky even to beat the rake in a game like that. And the book is peppered with examples just like this.
I understand there are a bunch of poker players out there who strongly disagree with me, who feel that I have misinterpreted the Wisdom from the Master and defiled Holy Cyberspace with my Unbelief. All I can say to them is this: using the hard-won knowledge you've mined from your well-thumbed copy of Sklansky's books, I hereby invite you to come to my club and play in my game and take my money. Make me a believer.
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