JV'S KILLER POKER:
Bullies!

BY: John Vorhaus

Are you a bully? Do you have a bully's nature. Probably not. Probably you weren't the sort of child who waylaid other kids on their way to school and stole their lunch money. That sort of person generally doesn't grow up to be a poker player. No, that sort of person generally grows up to do 10-to-life for aggravated manslaughter. So you might not have a bully's nature to begin with. The question, then, is this: Can you acquire bully consciousness? Can you develop the aggressiveness, the meanness, the sheer cussed-mindedness that it takes to succeed in the competitive, Darwinian schoolyard that we call poker?

I think you can. You just have to know where to find your victims and how to make them suffer. Let's paint a picture.

It's $15-30 Texas hold 'em, and you and the other players have been moving money around for most of an afternoon or evening. A new player enters the game, one you identify as a player taking a shot at a game above his comfort level. How do you know? First, you note that he buys into the game for a scant $300. He's playing scared to start. Second, you notice that his hands are shaking and his eyes dart furtively around the table. He's nervous. Palpably, visibly nervous.

You can easily figure out his strategy, such as it is: He's hoping to catch some premium cards early on, play straightforward laydown poker (where he has the best hand all the way through and can just lay down the winner at the end) and escape with a quick hit-and-run victory. He's determined to play extremely tight and not get out of line. The moment he sat down, he revealed himself to you completely. He might as well be playing his cards face-up.

So, what do you do when he takes his first blind? Well, what would a bully do? That's right, a bully would raise! So that's what you do. Remember, this is a player who's running scared to begin with. He doesn't want to defend his blind. He'd rather take his blind unraised and hope to catch a lucky flop. Don't give him that option! Put the heat on him immediately and keep it on him consistently. His blind hand is a random hand. It's more likely to be rags than riches. Couple this fact with your foe's natural timidity and you have the perfect opportunity to attack and pummel, knock him to the dirt, and then kick him when he's down.

Killer Poker players are bullies, and bullies consider all players weak until proven strong. So they'll test their foes at the outset, just to see what they're made of. Sometimes it's self-fulfilling prophecy: If you push around an otherwise strong player from the start, he may never has a chance to establish his strength.

So you attack this new player's blind and, good little meekie that he is, he surrenders without a fight. Bully for you. But now, a few hands later, it's your blind, and he returns the favor by attacking you back. What do you do?

Reraise. Reraise! And I don't even care what your cards are. In this situation there are only two possibilities: Either he has a real hand or else he's (foolishly) trying to bully a bully back. If it's the latter circumstance, your reraise will put him back on his heels again, and throw him into the difficult ditch of having to defend with his money a hand he had no business playing in the first place. If it's the former circumstance, if he has a real hand, remember that there's a whole range of hands he could consider "real", everything from A-Q suited to a pair of jacks. If he has anything less than a pair of aces, your reraise must scare him at least a little, and that's all the opening you need.

He won't fold here, no way. If he folds now, he's a cowering coward and he can't hope to wrest control away from you for as long as he stays at the table. What he'll do instead is call and pray. He'll hope to hit the flop in a major way and then trap you with your own aggressiveness, your bully nature. Trouble for him is that most flops will miss his hand, because most flops miss most hands. You won't care about that. You'll bet any flop as if you hit it and hit it hard. Now he's be faced with the tough choice of calling with nothing or folding and being a cowering coward.

Poor meekie. The second best thing he can do now is get up and go before you strip his wallet bare. The best thing he could have done was not to sit down in the first place, but that chance has passed. Soon a pattern emerges. He bets, you raise, he calls and hopes. Eventually his hope must lead to despair, because the only way he can beat you is to catch cards. But you don't need to catch cards to beat him!

This is the fundamental truth of bully consciousness: You don't need cards to win. You need only to identify scared, straightforward players, and then assault them with a feral, rabid approach to poker that they're utterly incapable of coping with. Once in a while they'll draw out on you. Once in a while they'll trap you too. But they'll only win with superior cards, while you will win with any cards at all.

Don't believe me? Do you think I'm sending you down a reckless path to your own destruction? Fine. Fine, turn your back on bully consciousness. Keep playing it safe, and keep deluding yourself that safety equals success in poker. It's your money, not mine.

But it won't be your money for long.

(John Vorhaus is author of the KILLER POKER series and News Ambassador for UltimateBet.com.)