A Celebrity Poker Challenge

Recently I played in the Poker Celebrity Bowl in Maricopa, Arizona, and found it an interesting challenge, for reasons I'll discuss below. Before we get to that, here's a quick shout-out to the hosts and sponsors of the tournament: Harrah's Ak-Chin Casino, the Heartland Poker Tour, and, especially, the Royce Clayton Family Foundation, to whose benefit went the proceeds. I'm a sucker for any poker tournament for a worthy cause, and when it's run with as much expertise and care as this one was, well, I'm a double sucker.

Sucker though I may be, whenever I sit down to play tournament poker, my first order of business is to figure out what kind of foes I'm up against, and what sort of strategies I'll need to use to defeat them. This is usually a straightforward proposition, because while the foes I face may range in ability from outstanding to, um, "needs work," their understanding of the game is roughly analogous to mine, and their goals are generally the same: to do their best and try to win.

But at celebrity/charity events, participants often aren't there with common goals or analogous understanding. They might have no knowledge at all of tournament strategy; they may not even know correct tournament protocol. That's because the field at a celebrity poker tournament is a mixed bag of serious-minded (though also charity-minded) top pros, plus big-name celebrities, and avid amateurs. This divergence of goals and skills can make things quite tricky down there on the felt.

Let's start with the pros. We can assume that they're in it to win it, and we can further assume that they bring their full arsenal of tools and talent to the task. It being a charity event, some of your top pros may be playing at something less than the top of their game. For instance, at the Poker Celebrity Bowl, I saw one big-name player using "alcohol as a performance-enhancing drug." Still, you can't count on even the most "performance-enhanced" pro to make too many rookie mistakes.

What about the celebrities? They can be anyone from sports figures or movie stars to mooks like me who have written a book or two and are flattered to sign autographs, even for people who have no idea who I am, but know I must be someone because I have a celebrity-colored wristband on. (A real ego trip, that, but it's a story for another time.) In this day and age, many celebrity players have outstanding poker ability - but also, many don't. If you're facing, say, the starting center for an NBA team, you don't know if his presence here is backed by close study of Harrington on Hold'em or just close friendship with the tournament host. You'll find out soon enough, but at the outset you don't know - and this is a problem you never face in a regular poker tournament, where, at least, everybody knows what beats what.

Then there are the amateurs, whose motivation can be all over the map. Maybe, like the pros, they're in it to win it. Maybe they like donating to the cause. Maybe they just want to rub shoulders with the stars. As with the celebrities, their skills can range from outstanding to "last float on the clueless parade." You simply won't know until you start to watch them play.

So now, here's your challenge: Analyze the players arrayed against you; figure out who's got game, and how they plan to use it; then devise and implement your counterstrategies. Alas, it's not quite that simple, because the strategies that work well against some of your foes may result in devastating responses from others.

Let's say you're sitting with a top pro on your left and a pure poker virgin on your right. You can reliably predict that the novice will give you great action with weak hands - and possibly stack himself right off with wildly inferior cards. So your correct strategy is to raise with semistrong hands and take advantage of his ignorance. Trouble is, the pro to your left knows this strategy, too, and his reraise in response to your raise could be the sign of a real hand, or just an indirect assault on the clueless novice with poor you acting as his proxy. The very tactic that works against one foe leaves you open to attack from the other.

To take another pretzel situation, you've watched an amateur stargazer folding hand after hand because he's just happy to be here and doesn't want his shoulder-rubbing time to end. Now he gets involved in a hand with a celebrity, and you're thinking about jumping into the fray. But how do you rate the amateur's strength? Does he have a real hand, or does he just want a story to tell about the time he got to play a big pot against Mr. Big-Time Celebrity? As has often been said, "You can't figure out their strategy if they don't have one." Here, they might have a strategy, but it may or may not have anything to do with the goal of winning the hand.

Think about these issues and situations the next time you play in a celebrity/charity poker tournament. (And do take the opportunity to play in such events, for they're always fun and always for a good cause.) While you might expect an easy route to a final table because there are so many weak spots in the field, in practice, the opposite is often true. Against wildly varying skill sets and motivations, it's hard to draw a reliable bead on any given foe, especially without exposing your flank to the pros in your midst.

Behind and beneath all this, of course, is the question of your own goals. Sometimes it's fun to just let your hair down and play charity poker with celebrity players. If that's your thinking, fine: Go ahead, have fun, and enjoy your write-off at tax time. But if you're in it to win it, recognize that a charity tournament can be a peculiar kind of sleigh ride, where making the right move at the right time against the right opponent can have exactly the wrong result. Oh, well, that's poker, and whether our goal for the game is to end world hunger, line our pockets, or get our idol's autograph, things don't always work out exactly as we planned.

John Vorhaus is the author of the Killer Poker book series. He resides in cyberspace at vorza.com, and in the blogosphere at somnifer.typepad.com.