That's Not Poker!

I recently caught some of the World Series of Poker main-event action on ESPN and spotted one of my favorite players to watch, Daniel Negreanu. Besides being one of the best poker players around, he's genuinely one of the most fun poker players to watch or play against. He had a great run in the WSOP main event, and survived a long time on a short stack. Daniel was at his best with lots of great lines, including one that came up after he made a standard size raise of something like $350, and it was followed by an opponent making a gigantic oversized raise of something like $7,000. As Daniel glared at his opponent and folded his hand, he said, "That's not poker!"



"That's not poker!" is a sentiment that's been going around a lot at the WSOP the past couple of years, for a variety of reasons. Mostly, it's about weaker and less-experienced players getting lucky against stronger and more-experienced players. When people say, "That's not poker!" what they really mean is, "Somebody doesn't know how to play poker (yet)!" Even some of the very best players early in their careers probably started out playing poorly, experimenting with the hands they played and the size of their bets. The unique and interesting phenomenon today is that you find this kind of play in the $10,000 WSOP main event!



So, what's wrong with betting $7,000 into a $500 pot? In a nutshell, you're betting $7,000 to win $500. You're risking 14 times what you can win in the pot. There is one situataion in which it's not so terrible to make this bet: You have a pair of aces (or maybe a pair of kings) and decide that you'd like to just win the pot risk-free rather than try to figure out if Daniel outflopped you. After all, he is a tricky and dangerous player to mess around with. On the other hand, there are some inexperienced players who may call and end up giving you a lot of chips with weaker pairs. However, I've seen people make a gigantic oversized raise with any pair or any big ace. If you keep playing that way, eventually the better players will figure it out and probably win all of your chips. This "beginner strategy" is reminiscent of something suggested by David Sklansky years ago.

Sklansky is one of the most prolific poker book writers, as well as one of the earliest mathematicians to analyze poker extensively. He was approached by a casino manager who wanted to allow his 21-year-old daughter to participate in the WSOP main event without extensive training. In response, Sklansky invented a simple beginner strategy to enable someone with virtually no experience to participate in a no-limit hold'em tournament. This is known as the "Sklansky System." He and others have developed some new variations that enable a novice to memorize a few simple playing rules and sit down with some confidence to participate in a tournament. Typically, these rules direct a player to either fold or go all in before the flop most of the time. Although it wasn't an all-in bet, that $7,000 raise smells a lot like it could be one of these variations. Sklansky may have unleashed a monster on the poker world!



To some people, poker is just another form of gambling, like blackjack, so it would be natural to look for some simple rules like blackjack basic strategy to start off with. If you're following some simple rules to participate in a poker tournament, maybe "That's not poker!" but that's OK!

Robert is the 2002 World Series of Poker champion, and you can play poker with him online by signing up at www.interpoker.com/rob,which offers up to a $121 limited-time bonus.