Larceny in His Heart!

Some people have larceny in their hearts. It is inherent in their nature and it carries over when they sit down at a poker table. Give them any opportunity to try to steal a pot and they just can't help themselves. They just gotta go for it! As a player, you need to recognize these types of players and utilize a strategy to straighten out their pilfering mentality, refine them into more honest and better people, and more importantly, make them much easier to read at the poker table.

In one of my recent sessions, a tight and timid player had called the pot up front. Everyone else folded around to an overly aggressive local pro, who raised from late position. I knew the pro's strategy very well – he would try to run over the opening player if he had any hand that was even marginally playable. I was in the big blind holding A-10 offsuit, and called the pro's raise, as did the timid player.

The flop came down A-8-4, all offsuit. Against a player who would raise from late position and then take a free card, I would have led into the field with this hand. However, the pro was a guy with larceny in his heart; he would automatically bet the flop no matter what he had. I checked, the timid player checked behind me, and as I expected, the pro bet.

Since I already knew what action the pro was going to take, and also knew that he was a player with few tells, I chose to watch the timid player behind me as the pro bet, hoping to get a read on what action he might take. As the pro bet, the timid player picked up the chip on his cards. I knew that he was going to fold behind me.

Had I not been given that information, I would have had a much greater propensity to raise the pro than call. If I flat-called and let the timid player take a card off, he would have been getting 8.67-1 on his call with two large betting rounds to follow. That price would make a lot of calls correct. As a general concept, you do not want to allow your opponents to make correct calls. You generally want to reduce the price that your opponents get from the pot by raising, and if they are taking the worst of it, hope they call. If an opponent calls a bet of yours when receiving the correct price, you have lost expectation vs. had he folded. If a player calls a bet without receiving the correct odds from the pot, your expectation has increased.

Manipulating these types of situations into your favor can greatly increase your expectation. If you are going to give your opponents an opportunity to call a bet without applying pressure, either your hand needs to be so strong that your opponents are very unlikely to draw out on you or the pot needs to be very small. Notice how, in each of these cases, the price that your opponent is receiving from the pot is very, very low. With lots of bets in the pot, it does not take many outs to be drawing correctly on the flop if all you have to call is one small bet.

Knowing that the timid player was going to fold allowed me to make my play based only on the propensity of the pro to bet, being the thieving sort that I knew him to be. I called the pro and checked the turn, fully expecting him to bet again. He did not disappoint me. If I am up against a player who will bluff the river, I will often flat-call the turn and let him bluff his chips away once more on the river. This particular player generally checks the river if he has a mediocre hand. He also knows that I make a lot of raise-bluff plays at him since he knows that I know that he is bluffing a large percentage of the time. Therefore, he pays me off with a lot of weak hands. Knowing that, I check-raised the turn, got called, and followed through and bet the river. He paid me off, never showing his hand.

This hand speaks to playing your players. You must recognize and utilize to your advantage the tendencies of your opponents, and use counterstrategies to take away the edges in their play. In this case, my opponent was just too predictably aggressive, and I used it against him in an aikido-like style. I let him fire and trap himself. Had he been a player who would check the turn without an ace, I would have played my hand differently.

Robbing pots is part of the game. However, many players – like my opponent in this hand – try to steal so often that their opponents use it against them. And in lots of cases, that will result in the robbers getting robbed, or at least beaten for some extra chips.

Editor's note: Roy Cooke played winning professional poker for 16 years. He is a successful real estate broker/salesperson in Las Vegas – please see his ad on Page 115.