You sit at a poker table in Las Vegas, playing no-limit Texas Hold'em.
A couple of thousand dollars in chips are stacked in front of you. All around the table,
players dip their heads to discreetly check cards. Tall stacks get pushed toward
the table's center in a casually practiced way.
Calling a $400 bet and raising back with a tiny bit of fear, you feel like Steve McQueen
in The Cincinnati Kid. Or at least Matt Damon in Rounders. You reexamine
the two cards you've been dealt: ace-king, suited. The cockiest guy at the table, a
weedy Brit in a fishing hat, habitually bets large and scares out players. Not this
time. After he calls and raises back, with the confidence of world-renowned poker
player Phil Hellmuth on a rush, you push your entire stack into the pot. Players
fold quickly. The Brit considers for a while, tries to check your eyes, but you're
looking downward, holding yourself stock still, betraying nothing. Finally he mucks his
hand. With a flourish, you roll your suited cards for all to see, smile big, let them
realize that it was no bluff, and rake in the pot like the champ that you surely are.
Bye-bye, Brit, you think, a hand later, when he pushes his seriously reduced stack into
the pot and goes all out with the kind of hand that's a desperation play.
Notice that this is written in the second person. It's you, not Doyle Brunson or
Huck Seed or some other high-stakes poker genius throwing around those plastic disks as
if they're potato chips. And this is the kind of no-limit Hold'em game in
which you don't need to mortgage your house to get a seat at the table.
If you want to get a taste of how it feels to play with the big boys, to partake in the
game that Brunson characterizes as "the Cadillac of poker," there is no better place
than one of the regularly scheduled tournaments at the Mandalay, Orleans and Mirage
casinos (all with buy-ins of less than $100). At the Mandalay the required
kick-in is as little as $25. You won't get rich at this table, but
it's a chance to play no-limit (after the first hour of play) with a low-priced entry
fee. Break 29 other players, and you walk away with $300 (the remaining prize money gets
split among the other top three finishers). Get really good, build up your
confidence, and you can take a shot at a Super Satellite, a pre-World Series of Poker
tournament that you enter for $225 with the hope of gunning your way to a $10,000 Series
seat. It's a serious event where you're liable to find yourself seated alongside
any number of pros who'd rather beat a hundred or so other entrants and win a seat in
the Series rather than pay for it.
That's what I've got my eye on when I arrive in Vegas a couple weeks before the big
game. The idea will be to warm up with a bunch of small tournaments, sit down for a
coaching session with former World Series of Poker champion Tom McEvoy, and then take a
shot at winning a Series spot. But first, a primer on how Hold'em tournaments
work. They're often described as freeze-outs, and for good reason. Everybody begins with
an equal amount of chips; once your chips are gone (and, no, they can't be converted to
cash), you're out of the tournament. In the end two players hold all the chips,
playing heads-up against each another. Often for the first hour of play there are
rebuys, meaning that if you go bust or your chip pile dips below the buy-in amount, you
can rebuy; after that hour everybody gets a chance to buy more chips. Then you
play with what's in front of you till it's gone or till all the chips are yours.
Texas Hold'em is a fast-paced, bluff-intensive form of poker in which the pot is
initially fortified by a pair of rotating blinds. Each player is dealt two down cards
that precede a round of betting, then three community cards are turned over in the
center of the table (this is called the flop) and more betting ensues, a fourth card
gets revealed (called the turn or Fourth Street), the players bet again, and a fifth
card comes up (it's called the river or Fifth Street, and initiates a last round of
betting). You use however many community cards
you desire plus one or both that you've been dealt to make your best possible
five-card hand. A dealer button rotates around the table.
One morning at the Mandalay I have made it to the final table and I'm sitting pretty
with a pair of pocket kings. A couple of players limp in, one guy makes a good-sized
bet, and I push all my chips -- not as many as I need to seriously intimidate anybody
here -- to the center of the table. It's the right move at the right time and has a chance
to turn me into a formidable contender. That's when a bald guy in a cardigan sweater
sees my bet and pushes his bigger pile forward. Whoops. He's got ace-king. If a king
comes up, great. If an ace comes, with no kings, the pot is his. His second ace rears
itself on the flop. Rags follow. I'm toast. Unlucky? Sure, but people will argue about
that being part of Hold'em's beauty. "If no luck was involved," says one pro, "you'd
have the same three people winning the World Series every year."
Later that afternoon, at Binion's Horseshoe, I watch McEvoy make it to a final
table of his own. Albeit, the stakes here are a bit higher than at the Mandalay:
a $2,000 buy-in tournament of SHOE (alternating rounds of Stud, Hold'em, Omaha
Eight-or-Better and Eight-or-Better Stud) in which the top prize is
$140,455. Wearing a garish purple silk shirt, the gray-haired yet still baby-faced
McEvoy goes down fighting and rakes in a third prize of $35,115. A day later, between
big-money games, he's in my room at the Mandalay, playing hypothetical hands of Hold'em
and showing me what I do wrong -- bet too tentatively, fold too often, don't read my
opponent clearly enough. "Other than that, though, everything is fine?" I ask.
He tells me that, actually, it is. With a bit of focus and practice, McEvoy says, I can
work my way into being a decent tournament player. He even figures that I handled myself
all right during that last hand at the Mandalay: "When somebody re-raises your pair of
kings, you can take a chance by calling [and risk that the person will hit on a winning
hand]. Or else you can try to claim the pot right there [by going all in]. You bet the
shit out of your cards and remove the guesswork." He lets this sink in and becomes
philosophical. "Look, this isn't the World Series of Poker" -- where one player folded
pocket kings at the final table, correctly believing that his opponent had aces -- "and
kings are the hardest hand to get away from. So you won't get away from it. If you get
dealt two kings you'll play them. If you come up against two aces, well, that was the
luck of the draw."
Less luck-oriented are a few stock moves that McEvoy suggests keeping in mind. "People
make a mistake of checking to the pre-flop bettor; but if you have a top pair with a
reasonable kicker, you should lead into him," he says. "Also, if you have, let's say,
7-6, suited, I wouldn't go in against one player, but I would go in, in later position,
against a few of them [because it promises to produce a richer pot and makes the call
more potentially profitable if your straight or flush hits on the flop]. When you make a
bet and somebody comes in over the top of you [with a big raise], good players bump
back. But if you do bluff, make sure it's against a good player -- bad players probably
won't even recognize what you're trying to convey and it will be completely
ineffective."
With a pair of pocket aces, though, you'd think that drawing in as many players as
possible would be a good thing. Not so, says McEvoy. "You want to get just one player to
call you. You don't want a whole bunch of people in there with you because there's a
good chance then that somebody will get lucky and draw the cards to beat you. If the
blinds are $100 and $200, make it $600 or $700 to go."
Whether they're playing tournaments or not, McEvoy says, mediocre players tend to raise
without fully formed ideas of what they hope to accomplish. To a poker pro this
would be the equivalent of a trial attorney reading weather reports to the jury in lieu
of a closing argument. You should have a concrete goal in mind when you raise, he says.
"Maybe you're trying to build up the pot because your hand will be strong enough to hold
up and win. Or else you are trying to drive out people who would limp in with the hope
of drawing a flush or straight. Mindlessly raising will only make the pot more
attractive to other players and force you to spend more money." There's one other thing
to keep in mind: "If somebody bets too much or too little, it looks like he doesn't know
what he's doing. In late position [regarding how close you are to the dealer button],
you want to bring it in for four or five times the size of the big blind."
A night later McEvoy sits alongside me for a $40 buy-in tournament at the Orleans Hotel.
In the casino's utilitarian poker room, he watches as I play decent poker for a couple
hours, only to get beaten when I go all in with queens. McEvoy deems my tournament play
respectable, suitably patient, but a bit tight and predictable. Considering that he's a
self-described "tournament specialist" with four gold World Series of Poker bracelets to
his credit (he won the big game in 1983 and snagged the others by finishing first in
smaller WSOP events over the years), I take this as a confidence-buoying compliment.
When I find myself in Binion's Horseshoe a couple afternoons later, flush from a nice
run at an open Hold'em game, I decide to pony up the $225 and take my chances for a seat
at the World Series. Upstairs, in the Horseshoe coffee shop, I happen to run into
McEvoy, who offers me a quick refresher course on basic Hold'em tournament
strategy. One thing I want to know: What makes him a winner in a room full of losers?
McEvoy is working his way through a rack of barbecued ribs, and he takes a moment to
consider the question. Wiping his fingers, he says, "First, I'm more selective with the
hands I raise with; I play very aggressively with big hands but hold back if I don't
seem to have the best of it. Second, my patience level is probably higher [than that of
other players], so I'm not going in with mediocre hands and trying to chase cards.
Third, I'm good at reading people. But the fact of the matter is that play becomes more
predictable in tournaments than in ring games, where guys tend to gamble on a lot of
different hands."
I think about all this when I sit down at the table. Unfortunately, I'm also thinking
about a lot of other things: how great it'll be for this story if I make it into the
Series, what sort of image I want to maintain at the table, how to riffle chips and look
as if the Horseshoe is my second home. I'm thinking about so many things
that the game passes in an ugly blur -- sort of like a car accident where you know what's
happening but you can't do anything to stop it, so you close your eyes and prepare for
impact. I can't even tell you about the hands I play, but suffice it to say that I play
them badly. I'm betting when I shouldn't, seeing raises that are ridiculous, not
watching the other players. Operating like that, it's no surprise that my stack is
promptly depleted. I lose my final hand with a boneheaded play and walk away from the
table feeling as if I've been mugged.
Things go so badly that I find myself wondering if it's even sensible to enter another
Super Satellite. Is it just throwing good money after bad? The next morning I have
breakfast with a savvy pro named Ken "Skyhawk" Flaton. He eats his cereal and listens to
my woes. He's probably just trying to make me feel better when he tells me that this
even happens to the best players. But he does offer some good advice:
"When you're getting ready to make a big play -- especially if you are not 100 percent
certain -- just sit there for a moment and silently count to 10," Flaton says. "It gives
you a chance to consider your next move and prevents you from doing anything hasty."
McEvoy pep-talks me with tales that illustrate his penchant for hanging tough under
adverse conditions. "My strength is that I don't ever give up," he tells me, just after
I've bought in for another Super Satellite. "I fight till the last chip; I like to say
that I fight until the last drop of their blood is spilled. I am an expert at surviving
in tournaments."
McEvoy explains that the best test of his high-stakes survival skills unfolded during a
tournament at the Peppermill Casino in Reno. Down to $75 in chips, he waited for
decent starting cards and went all in with king-jack -- not a great hand, but time was not
on his side. McEvoy made a straight and won six times his money, but it still
left him far from solvent at this table. "I wound up throwing away two-thirds of my
stack with blinds" -- a particularly gutsy move, as it can leave you depleted of chips
without even attempting to win a pot -- "while I was waiting for a playable hand, and it
turned out to be a winner. By the time we hit the final table…I had over $100,000 in
chips, accumulated after being down to $75. I went on to win that tournament."
With McEvoy's words still ringing in my ears, I sit down at the Super Satellite fired up
but focused, adamant to treat each of my chips like valuable ammo. I bet big with good
hands, lure people
in, fold when somebody's getting over. One guy stays in alongside
me and looks shocked when he sees my straight. "You played that perfectly," he says with
resignation, bummed out over the way I let him lead the betting up until the last card,
when I hammered him with raises and he felt too committed to do anything but stay in. By
the first break, I am either the chip leader or damned close, with $900. McEvoy walks
past the table and seems impressed. "I bet you're having fun now," he says with a
smile.
And I am having fun, throwing my weight around, able to afford the occasional
semi-bluff, and luxuriating in the fact that I have enough of a cushion to take risks
and weather small mistakes. Clearly, however, I should be more concerned about the big
mistakes, like going all in with king-queen, suited, when a guy raises me hard after I
make a modest bet of $400. We flip our cards and he has ace-queen, unsuited. Fine, I
still have a chance. But then a queen comes on the flop and nothing else helps either of
us. His ace gives him the hand -- and all my chips. Suddenly I'm no longer one of the elite
players. I'm another schnook who made a dumb move and got bounced out of the tournament.
McEvoy offers little sympathy. "That was a terrible play," he scolds, pointing out that
my king against his ace made me a major underdog. "If he raised into you, what else
could he have had besides an ace? You fold in that kind
of situation. Or else you should have made a big bet. Four hundred dollars was a pussy
bet and it did not telegraph strength. He gave you credit for a medium-strength
hand."
"So," I say, "if I had a pair of aces, what I did would have been a good play, a good
trap."
"You're not a sophisticated enough player to lay a trap like that," McEvoy counters
dismissively. "You wouldn't think to do it."
I'm tempted to reply, "Wanna bet?" Then I think better of it. Who knows? One day McEvoy
might be sitting at the same tournament table as me. Maybe I'll get dealt a pair of
aces. And maybe he won't be expecting the trap. But it will be waiting for him.
Michael Kaplan writes on gambling for Cigar Aficionado.
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