Given that I do play poker sometimes, and I mention that fact every now and then, I do get a lot of poker-related questions.

I mentioned that I played yesterday, and it sparked some renewed interest in my personal poker habits.

In general, I tend to steer clear of talking about my personal gambling. I’m not sure why, I just typically don’t like discussing it. Gambling seems like a highly personal endeavor to me. Talking about it seems weird. If you win, you seem like a bragging, self-congratulatory prick, and if you lose, then you seem like a pathetic degenerate gambler.

I suppose if I lost every time, I would have no trouble posting about it … but it would be dishonest. I don’t lose every time. Therefore, to avoid the embarrassing self-indulgence of bragging when I win, I tend to avoid speaking about my personal gambling altogether.

And let’s face it, there are enough gambling sites on the Internet with people who simply can’t wait to tell you how much money they made or lost, including a blow-by-blow account of exactly how it happened. I’m not quite that social about my gambling.

Also, talking about my Poker style will allow anyone who reads about it to beat me … but after mulling it over, I suppose that if there is an interest, it is only reasonable to impart my own personal wisdom (or lack thereof) about live poker in Las Vegas.

Some people are genuinely interested in my own take on the game, so I’ll go ahead and address it for the first time in a long time.

I realize that poker people are extremely opinionated about the game, and convinced that they (and only they) know best, so I fully expect that people will disagree with everything I shall proceed to say.

I don’t care. Take if for what it’s worth, if anything.

What are my favorite rooms?

When Poker is a job: The Mandalay Bay

When Poker is a hobby: The Venetian

I’ve played every room on The Strip incalculable times, but if I had to pick favorites, those would be my choices.

The Mandalay Bay offers a large amount of tourist turnover, and it is not (yet) as widely exploited by locals as the other Strip rooms.

I cannot play poker with people who know me. I cannot beat people who play with me often, and I depend on random tourists who I have never met before in order to make any money.

Why can’t I beat players who know me?

Because they know that I am tighter than a frog’s ass. If I throw chips in the pot, I am ahead. Period. If I come over the top, I have the nuts or something reasonably close to it. If I have nothing, I muck. It’s just that simple. There is no strategy or finesse to my game. I call or bet small when the odds are in my favor, I raise when the odds are WAY in my favor, and I muck races, marginal hands, or anything that I can’t read.

How on earth can someone make money playing like this?

It’s easier than you think.

First, you have to be humble, and not care what people think of you. This may seem like very simple advice, but it is much, much harder to execute than it seems. Much like females, males DO preen for each other. They wear collegiate sports sweatshirts to show that they received a formal education, they wear nice watches to show that they have good jobs, they make sure you see the cool new cellphone they have, and they like their girlfriends to come by the table so the other males know they are getting some.

They also like to do the “Hey babe!”. They will pick up their cellphone even when it doesn’t audibly ring, and say “Hey babe, I’m at the table right now. I’ll be up in about an hour.”

This leads other males at the table to believe that they have pussy back up at the room waiting for them. Even if they don’t.

Resisting the urge to impress other males, is quite frankly, impossible for most men.

For whatever reason, I did not inherit this gene. I’m not gay (not that there is anything wrong with that), but I don’t have the “car gene” (I hate driving, and don’t know a spark plug from a gas cap) or the “bravado gene”. I just do my thing and don’t really think about how it is perceived.

From my earliest recollection, I cannot once remember a time when impressing those around me with material wealth occurred to me.

Whether I was rich, poor, or somewhere in between (and I have been all of the above), I wore the same clothes, drove the same car, and more often than not, took the bus, subway, or my bicycle.

I’ve never once in my life owned a new car. I’ve always bought used cars for cash outright, and driven them until they broke down, at which point I sold them to a junkyard. I’ve never paid more than $5,500 for a car.

In 2000, I drove from Washington DC to Los Angeles in a 1986 Saab with 250,000 miles on it.

A week before leaving, I bought the car for $900 in cash from a guy who was given the car to pay off a drug debt.

Nothing worked on it. The cruise control didn’t work and neither did the radio, so I wedged a boom-box between the windshield and dashboard. It was hard to get the car into 5^th gear … I had to grind it to find it.

It was a hatchback, and I folded the back seat down. I couldn’t see out of the rear window because I had a Stratocaster and a Fender amplifier in the back (which completely blocked the rear window), a few changes of clothes, a pillow, some food, and a few other possessions.

But in this car, I headed West for 3,000 miles.

As a matter of fact, I just looked and found a picture of it. This was my vehicle for the cross-country trip:

I stopped and lived in Vegas for a couple of months, living out of the Showboat, Stratosphere, Sahara, and the Vagabond Inn (a motel on the site of what is now the Palazzo).

When I finally got to LA, the car broke down just outside the gates of the Warner Brothers studios in Burbank.

I sold it to a junkyard, and settled in on the LA city bus and the LA Subway with 4 million of my closest Mexican and homeless friends.

Was I broke?

No. I was actually quite far from it. I could have easily bought a new car or three, and possibly could have bought the Vagabond Inn.

But I sure looked like I was broke, and that was perfectly cool with me. The perception never bothered me.

Money comes, money goes, sometimes I have it, sometimes I don’t. But I never look or act any differently whether I have one foot in the homeless shelter, or have a huge bank balance.

Having people envy me doesn’t make me happy, and having people look down on me doesn’t make me sad.

What was my point in all of that?

The point is that I think it allows me to make more money playing poker on the Vegas Strip than I could if I had any sense of normalcy.

You have to be willing to be perceived as an utter loser to increase your poker odds in this town, and most people simply cannot do it.

Human pride is stronger than heroin, and people just can’t break the addiction.

If you can get yourself not to care, then you can use other people’s vanity to your advantage.

Fumble your chips, ask “Who is playing today?” on Superbowl Sunday, just do anything to make other males think less of you. With a completely straight face say “I like that cellphone, I wish I could get one but Boost Mobile doesn’t have that model.” You’ll get snickers, and this is good.

You want to be the loser of the table.

Why?

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY wants to fold to the loser of the table. Not even chicks.

Of course, none of this would work online, and this is why I don’t play online.

Online … EVERYONE is a loser.

Rumor has it that some of these losers set up websites and ramble on like people give a shit about what they think. I can’t confirm that they really do this, but that is the word on the street.

Anyway …

This is why I only play in brick and mortar casinos. I don’t obsess over pot odds and outs. I know it is cliche’ but I play the player. I find the most testosterone-fueled, vain players I can find, and sit down.

But it’s not always easy. I need to find these players at a low blind, no limit poker game. If they were truly great, they would be at the Bellagio or Wynn playing 50/100 poker. So I need to find players who think they are great, but are not willing to back it up in a high-limit game.

For whatever reason, the Mandalay Bay captures the niche of high-esteem, low-limit players better than any other casino in town.

Why do I only play low blind no-limit games?

Because I don’t want to blind out or be forced to play hands that I don’t want to play because I am in the blind. If I need to wait an hour for a hand, I don’t want to give too much away in blinds.

This is why I will ALWAYS play the lowest limit game I can find.

The lower the limit, the more patient I can afford to be. And it’s all about patience.

1/2 or 2/5 is my maximum.

If they had a .01/.02 No Limit game, I would play that one.

I never, ever, under any circumstances play “limit poker”. That is not “poker”, IMHO. It’s a different game. It’s much more like bingo than it is poker, and the games are wholly dissimilar. I detest limit poker, and refuse to play it.

So how can you make consistent side money playing poker in Vegas with little actual skill?

First, swallow your pride. All of it. Embrace the loser. Be the loser.

Second of all, play on Sunday. Sunday is a very important day for Las Vegas poker. If you can’t play on Sunday, then always play in the morning. Never play at night, and certainly never at the start of a weekend.

Then, find 9 other people who don’t know you, preferably dudes 21-40 and sit down. Tourists love having their ego fed. Much like the “$20 trick”, pretending to be Johnny Chan is part of the “Vegas experience” for them.

Compliment them when they win. Say “great hand” when someone takes down a pot, and say things like “I’m glad that wasn’t me because I would have folded and lost.” Make them think they are superior to you.

Trust me, they already think they are superior to you, but you want to remove all doubt.

After that, my strategy is incredibly easy. I simply sit back and wait for a big hand. When I get the hand, I will get paid off by one, and probably two other tourists.

Almost never does everyone fold.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. No pot odds, no watching the other players for tells, no nothing. Just look for the tourists, and wait for a hand. If you have a poor hand, muck it. Don’t raise or bluff without a big hand.

You can’t bluff tourists on Sunday, because they want to play cards before hopping on the plane or in the car. They don’t want to be spectators. A monkey with a modicum of patience could make money at the Mandalay on Sunday.

When you make your money, walk. The game is over for you.

The longer you play, the greater your chances of taking a bad beat. If you get a bad beat, you want it to happen at the beginning with your initial buy-in. You can buy back in if you lose a small, initial stake. If you blow a big stack, you failed the objective.

When are you most likely to take a bad beat?

When you have the most money in the pot, of course. That’s why it’s called a “bad beat”.

You want to double or triple up with a little, not a lot. Don’t get greedy. Greed will kill you.

Yes, you want to be all in with $200 when your odds are 80%, but you don’t want to be all in with $10,000 when your odds are 80%.

Why? Because twenty percent happens … at least twenty percent of the time.

Money management is arguably more important than knowing how to play.

Is playing one hand and leaving the table after 15 minutes fun? Nope. But if you are trying to make some spare cash, fun has nothing to do with it.

Sure, the first couple hundred bucks may have been easy, but you will get badly beaten the longer you play. Trust me. When you achieve your goals (for me it is to double my money), leave and go home or do something else.

I rarely have “fun” playing poker. It is simply a part time job for me, and I want to get it over with as quickly as possible. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to make friends. I want to pay my Nevada Power bill. That’s it.

If you want to have “fun”, play a tournament, not a cash game.

When I double or triple up, I walk immediately.

Why would I stick around? I finished my job.

Of course, my opponents always curse me, complain, whine, call me names, threaten to harm me, or whatever.

Why?

Because I have their money, and I am leaving.

I smile and excuse myself while they scream about not getting the chance to win their money back.

Sometimes, they want the floor to force me to stay … but the floor can’t do that.

What I do is not “polite”, but if your routine is “aggressive with shit cards” play, I have no sympathy.

If you act like a pussy, you’re gonna get fucked.

More often than not, the players are drinking and the liquid asshole kicks in. When they scream at you, ignore it. You have their money, what more do you want?

Never drink and gamble if your goal is to win money. Ever.

If I need money, I will hit and run Mandalay for some extra income. If you are going to try to bluff me on every hand, don’t whine. You’re the one that bluffed. That’s why it’s called a “bluff”. Because you didn’t have anything. Your loss is your fault.

When I sit at a table with locals, many of them know me. They know how I play, and we stay out of each others way. We are all there to take the tourists money, so unless it is a locals casino, or a game known populated by locals … I generally get out of the way in a local vs. tourist hand. I know the guys who are trying to pay the rent, or who need gas money, so I typically muck against them if they have one or two tourists on the hook.

Is this collusion or soft play?

Maybe. But I won’t lie and tell you it doesn’t happen. There is a certain honor and unwritten code among locals that actually need the money they play with as opposed to tourists who are throwing daddy’s trust fund on the felt.

If you bust a fellow local just to swing your dick in a card race, it will come back on you. And maybe you will be the one who is short grocery money that week.

Why are Sundays so special?

Sunday is usually “going home day” for the tourists, and people with money to throw around usually want to get paid large, or go out in a blaze of glory. Either one makes for a great story to tell the folks back home.

In addition …. if there is one hard and fast stereotype about tourists, it is this: Tourists like to bluff.

Wait, scratch that … tourists LOVE to bluff.

They watch so many goddamn ESPN highlights, that they think people are supposed to bluff on every hand. They think it’s a much bigger part of the game than it really is.

In reality, decent players use the bluff very sparingly, and only when it is very plausible to do so.

I’ve seen large stack tourists move all-in after the flop five times in a row against weaker stacks.

Is it MY fault that I wait for cards and call their bluff? Do I owe them the chance to win their money back? They think yes, but obviously I disagree.

In a nutshell, that is how I make a little side money playing poker here. Simply sitting back and waiting for a hand. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes I will just go card dead and a hand never comes. Sometimes I will have a great hand, but the tourist really does have a better hand. It’s not free money. But it works often enough that it is worth a shot when you really just want to turn fifty cents into a dollar.

What is my favorite Poker Room in general?

The Venetian.

If I want to test my game against a wide variety of competition, I play the Venetian. The players run the gamut from beginner to expert at nearly every limit. If I can break even here, I am happy. It is not a predictable room. You really never know who you are going to get at the Venetian, and it’s a good place to practice.

I don’t always want to play hit and run. Sometimes I want to play for a couple of hours. In such cases, I go to the Venetian.

I like the Venetian because the layout is anti-Bellagio. I am 6′3, 185-ish pounds, and I find the Bellagio far too cramped for my size, to the point of being downright claustrophobic.

There is a lot of space between the tables at the V, and I can move my chair back from the table to accommodate my long legs without people getting cranky. It is every bit as opulent as the Bellagio … without the horrible Bellagio Poker Room staff attitude.

If you buy in for $200 at the O, they give you a sneer. However, I can sit down at the V with $100 at a 1/2 game, and the podium and dealers welcome me all the same as if I had bought in for 1K at a 10/20.

Not as much snobbery, and they have a proper waiting area (couch and TV) in the room instead of making you stand at the rail like the kid who didn’t get picked for dodgeball in gym class.

Oh, yeah … the waitresses bring me big bottles of Fiji water at the V. Not tiny bottles of “house bottled water”, which I imagine they just scoop out of the toilet.

When the Venetian waitresses aren’t throwing drinks at me, they are also pretty easy on the eyes.

It is very relaxing. It’s like what a home poker game would be if you lived in a mansion. It’s typically laid-back, there is often a good mix of male and female players, there is not a lot of dick swinging, and I can watch TV and half-heartedly play some cards.

I don’t play hardcore at the V. I play pretty standard poker, with not a lot of money, and I don’t stress over it. It’s my “home room” for lack of a better term. The Hilton used to be my “home room”, but it’s gone … RIP.

So there you have it. Everything you always wanted to know (and more) about what I play, where I play, my personal advice, and why I do what I do regarding poker. It’s probably the last time I will acknowledge it for awhile.

I hope it bored you as much reading it as it bored me to type it.