Meek Marvin: Your Toughest Tournament Foe?

Some players believe that their toughest opponents at the tournament table are players like Phil, T.J., or Barbara – you know, the seasoned champions with bracelets up to their elbows – but that isn't always the case. Sometimes it's that passive limper sitting in seat No. 8 who causes you the most headaches. E-mailer Alan ran into just such a "Meek Marvin" in a limit hold'em tournament he recently played.

"One of the players at my table gave me a good deal of trouble," he began. "He was a perennial limper with loose standards for starting hands who tended to passively call after the flop. In live games, players like him are my bread and butter, but with a short stack in a tournament, it's another matter. With limits at $30-$60 and a stack size of $400, I figured that I had to be choosy about the hands that I played, and I wanted to be able to steal my fair share of the blinds. The trouble was that the limper seated across the table from me made my stealing next to impossible. If I'd had a deep stack, there would have been plenty of hands with which I happily would have trailed in after him in hope of hitting a few flops. But with my stack size, I was not comfortable with committing a significant portion of my chips to such gambles. How would you recommend playing in this situation?"

Good question, Alan. What do you do when you're playing in a tournament against a loose, passive player who plays a lot of hands, calls raises with marginal cards, and has a lot of chips? You simply have to wait for a better starting hand with which to attack him. You can't afford to mix it up with marginal starting hands against this type of guy, because he is virtually bluff-proof. Occasionally, however, I'll be so short-stacked that I simply must play a marginal hand against this type of player and hope that it wins.

You are correct in feeling uncomfortable about committing a significant portion of your chips in these types of situations. These players are always dangerous when they have lots of chips, because they are unpredictable. They are capable of showing you a white blackbird! When you're in a multiway pot with them, they are less of a factor because you're not fighting them alone. Meek Marvin is especially dangerous shorthanded, when you're trying to isolate against only one other player, because he keeps calling and getting in your way. This is in contrast to Maniac Mike, who keeps raising and getting in the way. Eventually, both types usually self-destruct.

Alan continued by describing his strategy: "I hunkered down and waited for superior cards that never came, but in retrospect, I think that I was playing too tightly. At one point, the limper and one other player were in the pot for one bet each. I held K-9 offsuit in late position. I didn't want to commit nearly 10 percent of my stack to a marginal hand, and I especially didn't want to be trapped into playing it for two bets in the event that a player after me had a real hand and raised, so I mucked it. Was I mistaken in laying it (and others like it) down before the flop?"

No, Alan, K-9 is simply too marginal a hand to be playing against two or more limpers.

Alan just couldn't get that passive limper off his mind, so he asked one more question: "Thinking about the difficult situation that the limper put me in, I began to wonder if I could do something similar to pin down small stacks. Normally, I don't open a tournament pot for one bet; I either raise or fold. But suppose that I have one of the larger stacks at a table where some players are beginning to get desperate. If I limp from early position with some hands that I ordinarily would fold (small suited connectors like 6-5), small stacks who might be tempted to steal with a hand like A-7 or K-3 would be deterred. In that case, I could take some implied-odds hands to the flop cheaply and maybe win an occasional big hand. It seems to me that this play could be especially useful when close to the bubble, particularly in hands when another big stack is taking the blinds. Do you think that this strategy makes sense?"

No, absolutely not. If you did that, you would be lowering your game to their level and playing their game, not yours. Playing hands such as 6-5 is a good way to destroy your big stack, not increase it. You're giving smaller stacks the chance to double through you and medium stacks a chance to hurt you. The medium stacks can then build themselves while you're tearing down your stack, and pretty soon, guess what? You're looking at them eye to eye. You would really be screwing things up if you started limping in with K-9 and 6-5 kinds of garbage.

The sooner you get Meek Marvin off your mind and start playing around him, not into him, the sooner you and I can share the glory and the gold in the winner's circle.

Editor's note: Tom McEvoy is the author of Tournament Poker, and the co-author (with T.J. Cloutier) of Championship No-Limit & Pot-Limit Hold'em and Championship Hold'em, which are available through Card Player. For more details, visit the web at www.pokerbooks.com.