Feeling Like Salieri

I’ll tell you who I feel bad for (and sometimes feel like): Antonio Salieri. Or at least the fictional version of him put forth in the movie Amadeus. There, this technically proficient composer of operas stands in awe and jealousy of the works of a mad, young musical genius, one Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Salieri knows that no matter how technically proficient he is (and they say he wrote a pretty damn fine opera in his time) he can’t match the effortless majesty of Mozart. He might be popular and acclaimed, but he’ll never be a genius. It’s simply not in the cards.

Yeah, I was thinking about poor Salieri yesterday while I watched a young friend of mine operate on a $5-$5 blind no-limit hold’em game at my local club. Taking it apart with surgical precision, he took over four grand out of the game in less than four hours.

While that outcome is extraordinary – and partly a function of running quite hot – there’s no denying that this kid is gifted in poker, gifted in a way that I, with my years of study, analysis, book reading, book writing and close introspection, will simply never be able to match. I’m Salieri to his Mozart. I stand in awe.

But as it’s my nature to analyze, I don’t stand in awe idly. After watching my friend utterly destroy the game, and strip-mine his opponents’ stacks, I decided to draw up a short list of the things he does right. It’s an instructive list.

He Puts Pressure. This young fellow – we’ll call him Wolfie – uses raises and reraises like rapiers. He never lets his opponents feel comfortable, and always lets them know that he’s capable of putting them to hard decisions on hand after hand after hand. This quickly has the effect of putting his timid foes in a certain sort of box. They simply stay out of his way – and will even say out loud that they’re afraid of him. It’s a remarkable thing. Wolfie can train his foes never to play back at him unless they have premium cards – which, of course, they’re then playing essentially face-up, since they’ve made it quite clear that they’ll only stand up to him with big tickets.

He Feels No Fear. In this particular session, an early bad beat put Wolfie deep into his second buy-in basically before his seat was warm. Now when I start out a session in a hole, it’s often hard for me to get my head on straight. Not Wolfie. He never lost his cool, never strayed from his game, never seemed to suffer from his setback, the way many of the rest of us will. Another element of this is that he’s not afraid to play big pots – the sort of pots that others often shy away from. This means he wins more when he wins, but it also keeps his opponents firmly outside their comfort zone, another aspect of putting pressure.

He Knows Where He’s At. The boy is blessed with a math mind. He sees numbers like I see words, and more power to him. But he uses that gift well, taking time to run the numbers on every betting proposition he faces. This goes beyond just counting outs and measuring them against pot size. He also factors in his foes’ stack sizes and the probability that they’ll stack off to him if the hand plays out a certain way. To understand this in simplest terms, he’s willing to take slightly the worst of it on a betting proposition against a large stack but not a small one, because he knows the potential reward is so much greater. And I want to stress that he takes his time with this. He doesn’t rush his decisions, and always makes the latest possible ones based on the best available information.

He Doesn’t Tilt. No, that’s not true. He tilts when he’s tired. But guess what? He doesn’t play when he’s tired. He knows his limitations and keeps within them. None of this “the game was too good to leave” nonsense for Wolfie. When he feels himself straying from perfect play, he just leaves. Further to this, he knows that late hours in tournaments will take their toll, so when he wants to play tournaments, he shifts his sleep schedule by as much as twelve hours, so that he can play the long hours of the tournament when his mind is fresh and sharp and clear.

He’s Good Company. When you’re literally the only one at the table who’s winning, it’s expected that other players will become resentful, maybe even abusive or mean. But not to Wolfie. They might be unhappy that they’re losing, but they never get angry at him, because he’s always such a pleasant presence at the table. I’m sure he’s never read Mike Caro’s (or anyone’s) sage advice to make people happy to play against you and happy to lose to you, but he understands that principle intuitively. You’ll never see him tap on the glass. Not ever. That’s pure egolessness in pursuit of top results, and it works great.

He Leverages His Edge. Some players can’t stand prosperity. They slowplay their strong hands and monster flops and, as a result, don’t make as much as they should with their good cards. Not Wolfie. He disguises the strength of his strong hands by playing all of his hands strongly. As a result, when he has the best of it, he gets maximum earn. He also has a knack for knowing when he’s ahead. He might only have middle pair, but if he thinks that middle pair is the best hand, he’ll play it like aces – and get paid off like aces, too. Wolfie understands that relative strength, not absolute strength, is what matters most in poker.

One thing Wolfie doesn’t do – and this drives me crazy – is he doesn’t study. He doesn’t care to read poker books or magazines, and doesn’t even really discuss his game with other players at his level. I guess when you’re Mozart you don’t have to. Meanwhile, for we who are not, I think it’s of value to study this list of things Wolfie does right. Just because we’re not naturally as gifted in poker as the geniuses of the game, there’s no reason why we can’t play stronger, do math, put pressure, feel no fear, and stay off tilt. We may never be Mozart, but we can at least be the best damn Salieris it’s in our power to be. ♠

John Vorhaus is author of the Killer Poker series and co-author of Decide to Play Great Poker, plus many mystery novels including World Series of Murder, available exclusively on Kindle. He tweets for no apparent reason @TrueFactBarFact and secretly controls the world from johnvorhaus.com.