I was just reading an interview with poker legend Barny Boatman. Barny said, “If a player from that first [European Poker Tour in] Monte Carlo were to find themselves in the 2025 Main Event, they’d think they were in a lunatic asylum!”
Poker has changed a lot in those 20 years since that first Monte Carlo event in 2005. The players are much better and more studied. The tools available to make you a better player would seem like science fiction to the 2005 poker community.
But fortunately, some things, like a live tell, haven’t changed at all.
Crazy Mike Caro
Players of a certain age will remember O.G. poker author and researcher “Crazy” Mike Caro. Mike plied the draw and lowball games of the Los Angeles area back in the 1970’s, and was one of the first people to think analytically and quantitatively about poker. Doyle Brunson had Mike do a bunch of statistical and odds work for the original Super System book, at a time when facts and stats we take for granted were largely unknown (or secretly held).
Mike wrote a dozen (?) books and published thousands of articles about poker strategy. He was also famous for recognizing “tells,” and wrote an entire book about them. Mike has a way with words, and you’ve probably heard one or more of his aphorisms, even if it wasn’t properly ascribed.
Recalling 40-Year-Old Advice
There I was in my regular $5/$10 NLHE cash game poker game. I’d made it $50 in late position with A♦️Q♦️, and just the big blind had called.
With $100 in the pot, the flop was J♦️-9♣️-3♦️. A great start for my hand. The BB checked, I bet $50, he thought briefly, then called. Now we had a $200 pot, and the turn was the blankest of 5♠️. He checked again, and I sized up, betting $300, or 150% of the pot. Again, he thought briefly and called. $800 in the pot.
My original plan was to jam the river for the $800-ish we had left – almost exactly a pot-size shove. But I was getting “sticky” vibes from my opponent. You’re a poker player so you’ll know what I mean, but I was now asking myself if checking down the second-nut-no-pair would be a better strategy, if it came to that.
Alas, the river was the 2♣️, and all my ideas about having the nuts flew out the window. The good news is that my opponent checked for a third time.
Jam? Check back and hope AQ was good?
I was sitting on a mental fence, when my opponent made my decision for me. He took three $100 chips in his hand, and held them out in front of him, as if daring me to bet.
Le Plus ça Change…
There’s a lovely French phrase, “Le plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” It means, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” In 1985, Mike Caro would have laughed at you if you’d told him about solvers and GTO poker. But the poker players of 1985 are, in some ways, no different than their counterparts 40 years later. Mike was probably the first person to state this fact of live poker:
When somebody holds chips out in front of them, making it clear that they’re going to call a bet, the very last thing they want is for you to bet.
When my opponent held those chips out in front of him, I barely suppressed a smile. It was as if he was participating in a photo shoot for a new edition of Mike Caro’s Book of Tells.
I also remembered something else Crazy Mike was famous for saying:
“Figure out what your opponent wants, then disappoint them.”
My opponent wanted me to check back. That meant that his poker range had some showdown value. If he didn’t have any showdown value, then he wouldn’t care if I bet or checked, because he had no hope of winning the pot anyway. For instance, if he had 87, and had turned a double gutter, then it didn’t matter if I bet or checked – he wasn’t winning the pot with 8-high.
No, that “chips in hand” maneuver was intended to make me check back, and he thought he had a decent chance of winning if I did.
So I Disappointed Him
I jammed my remaining $800 into the middle. I had a moment or two where I wondered if it was all Hollywood and he was just waiting to snap me off. But no, as soon I jammed, he sat back in his chair and put the chips back down in front of him.
He did not like that bet one bit. He hemmed and hawed a while, but finally slid his cards, face down, back to the dealer.
Me, I said a mental thank you to Crazy Mike Caro for those poker lessons in 1985 that are still invaluable, 40 years on.
