What is Killer Poker? To answer this question, I have to go back in time to 1996, and travel across space to Highland, California. I was driving with a buddy to Lake Arrowhead and we decided to stop off at the San Manuel Casino for a little poker. Both pretty much low rollers at the time, our understanding of the game extended no further than, pretty much, "When you get the goods, bet the goods." We sat down in a $3-$6 hold'em game, and saw something that made our jaws drop.
There was a maniac in the game. Of course we'd seen maniacs before: people who seemed to rate 7-2 offsuit on a par with pocket ones; idiots who'd chase three-outers to the river; misguided acolytes of small suited connectors. But this guy was a different breed of cat. He'd raise with anything -
anything - and then proceed to bet and raise on every street until his sheer avalanche of chips buried the opposition. He'd build these huge pots and then win them all because his relentless betting got everyone to chase him with nothing, until they missed all their draws and had to fold - or until he'd get called and invariably, uncannily, turn out to have a hand. Did he have luck on his side? I don't know. I do know that he practically herniated himself lugging his chip racks to the cage.
Wow, I thought,
this guy knows something I do not.
Late that night, in a little cabin on the shore of Lake Arrowhead, I tried to figure out what the something was. What made that maniac so successful, not just in winning chips but in dominating and crushing the game? It was, I realized, a question of goals. Where my goal in a poker game had always been to play correctly and win more than I lose, this guy's agenda was, quite simply, to make the other players' eyeballs bleed. I, therefore, could win only if I got lucky, but he could win by taking over the game. With the force of revelation I suddenly understood:
He's not even playing poker. He's playing …
Thus was Killer Poker born.
Thus did I take to my breast the notion that poker is not about cards and draws and odds, but rather about all-out psychological war, and that the true intent isn't just to win money but to make folks cower.
Not long after, I took my first stab at codifying the Killer Poker mindset.
Imagine that instead of playing poker, you're playing a secret game called "Raise!" where the object of the game is to raise as much as possible - the more raises you make, the higher your score. To your enemies, your actions would look reckless, a mistake. But according to your hidden rules, you're playing exactly correctly: a winning strategy in a different game. That's the secret to Killer Poker. Play exactly correctly according to your own hidden rules.
Further exploring the concept, I toyed with some crazy notions, such as the Suicide Raise Scenario, where I bought in for a rack of chips and bet or raised at every opportunity without exception until I either doubled my money or racked off. I had some indifferent success with that - won about as much as I lost - but proved at least one part of my hypothesis: If you play exactly correctly according to your own hidden set of rules, you can really take over a game. The other players at the table had no idea what I was doing - but they were clearly paying more attention to my play than to their own. This, I figured, had to be a good thing.
The first rule of Killer Poker, then, became
be bold. Over time I discovered a key corollary:
be truthful. It turns out that a glaring leak in most people's play is their simple unwillingness to face the hard facts of their play. They get hammered in a game and attribute it to bad luck instead of bad play. They tangle with superior foes because their egos won't let them admit they're outclassed. They justify foolish or self-indulgent moves with specious or circular logic. They leave their flaws unacknowledged, their assumptions unchallenged. And they do all of these things because, let's face it, the truth hurts.
But it seems to me that poverty hurts more, so I concluded early on that walking down the reckless path of Killer Poker must necessarily bring one to the odd juxtaposition of bald haughtiness and clear-eyed honesty - the oxymoron, in other words, of arrogant humility. Do you have this quality? Can you make your foes quake in their boots while yet acknowledging how little you know about the game and how much you still have to learn? Can you sell a superman image without buying into your own PR? If yes, then the Killer Poker approach to the game may be just the one you're looking for.
It's one I've been looking at - closely studying and refining - for more than a decade now, through half a dozen books and more hours of thought and play than I care to count. And it is with, yes, both arrogance and humility that I bring Killer Poker to the pages of
Card Player magazine. I don't imagine that mine is the only style of poker that works - the ocean is blue but it's also wet - yet I do believe that I have something useful to say about the game. I hope and trust that you'll enjoy my "holistic strategic" approach, and I look forward to hearing your feedback, comments, and thoughts.
If I could go back in time and revisit that cardroom at the San Manuel Casino, I'd track down the inspired maniac who turned me on to Killer Poker and thank him for opening my eyes. He didn't put it in so many words to me, but I would put it in so many words to you:
Go big or go home. Everything follows from that.
John Vorhaus is the author of the Killer Poker series of books. He resides in cyberspace at www.vorza.com.
