Who invited the Ninja to Poker Night?

I used to have a regular Tuesday night basketball quorum.

It was a group of close friends attempting to maim one another for possession of a leather ball that most of us probably no longer had sufficient skill to throw into a ten-foot high metal hoop from more than six feet away. We beat the crap out of each other in long drawn out games, and afterwards slapped each other high fives for making everything harder than was humane.

It was a lovefest, and we did it every week for many many years until nature herself tore our favorite gym down.

Time to play something else.

So we shrunk our quorum to a core group of the closest friends and moved our weekly need to destroy each other into somebody's living room. This new exercise in bonding was called poker night, and it was a moral dilemma for me.

I play and coach poker for a living, and none of my friends had so much as read a poker book. Nobody invites a professional basketball player to a pickup game among out-of-shape cubicle dwellers. The few times I've seen that happen, everyone told the pro to stay at least twenty feet away from the basket.  So how was I supposed to play at poker night?

I'm not here to tell you how to win against amateurs - there are too many boring books on the basics of that subject matter. Let me summarize those books for you: don't play garbage hands, don't play unless you are last to act, stay out of multiway pots, bet and raise when you have it, fold when you don't.

In fact, I'm not here to teach you how to decimate your friends. I don't want you to rip their heads off and force things down their spines. Don't scalp them, just take a few hairs. Steal their handkerchiefs, and let them keep the shirts on their backs.

Win quietly.

The next few tips I share will hopefully show you how to beat the crap out of your friends without reducing them to quivering confused raisins of their former selves. These are your friends. You want them to like you. You want them to have fun. You want them to enjoy giving you their money.

When you win a pot: shut your mouth and do not open it again until the next hand has been dealt and concluded. If someone calls you a lucky son of a dog, just agree.  You don't apologize. You don't tell them what they did wrong. You don't make a list of the things you will buy with their money.

I like to trash talk when I score on an athletic twenty-year old kid in basketball. I like to tell that person he just got owned by somebody twice his age who can't even touch his own toes. Sometimes I tell him to invite his mother for the next game.

There is no room for that in poker night. Trash talking only works when you are needling someone who is clearly expected to have more ability than you. At the poker table - especially if you are the identified pro - you have to let them do all the talking.

Don't talk trash. Talk shop.

Wait, I don't want you to put your shades, headphones, and hoodie on either. "Don't talk trash" doesn't mean "don't talk at all."

Poker night is a gathering of friends. Your intent to take their rent money is your dirty little secret. So talk about everything else. Tell a long anecdote to mask the length of time you've spent folding every hand before the flop. Talk about how watching Batman fighting Superman is the new worst thing that ever happened to you - topping that time you fell tongue-first into a septic tank.

These are your friends, so before you can take their money, you have to be their friend. Friends like giving friends money.

So give some back.

After a big win, stack up your chips and plan on playing the next few hands, maybe without even looking. I'm not saying you should call a shove with a five and a deuce in your hand. I'm saying loosen it up more than a few notches temporarily, but don't drive a scooter into a freight train.

Imagine the pro baller at your basketball quorum taking bad shots every now and then.  These "bad shots" are not from half court, and they are not with eyes closed. They are reasonable shots that he nonetheless knows are unlikely to be good. They sort of make up for that one time he dunked on three of you.

Do the same thing on the poker table. Make some loose calls with middle pair in small pots and say "I thought I had you" when he shows you the winning hand. Make a hopeless bluff and show them you got caught.

Toss them small pots.

Some people like to toss their friends some chips back after winning a metric ton from them. They flick back a few chips and say something completely fake and condescending like "lucky chips, for you."

I hate that. Don't do it, ever.  Refer to my tip on keeping your mouth shut after a win. The simple idea is this: You do not want to say or do anything that reminds them you just won.

So instead of being the schmuck who chucks rebates at his peers, be the guy who makes "mistakes" - That's the guy who can win a large pot and still get invited next week. 

I enclose the word "mistakes" in quotations because they won't actually be mistakes. They are the hands that you don't mind losing, and in fact sometimes play badly on purpose. This is you paying income tax discreetly. This is the cost of sales. This is the price of advertising. This is what it takes to create the image of a guy who "ain't that great, after all."

Keep costs down.

Make it look good, don't go nuts. No half court shots. Pay with small pots only. I cannot say this enough so I have to say it again: SMALL POTS. 

So what is a small pot? If you are going to beat the crap out of your friends, you will need to recognize the difference between small, medium, and large. I can take a shortcut and talk about BB's, but I prefer to paint some pictures.

Whenever you raise from the button or cutoff on a pure blind-steal, that's a small pot.

When someone opens for a raise and you re-raise from the blinds with the intention of giving up if you get a call, that's a small pot.

When you limp in, call a flop bet, the turn goes check check, and you make a small bluff on the river with little to no hope of winning a showdown, that's a small pot. 

When it is an unraised pot and you call someone on the river with a weak hand - aka a bluffcatcher - that's a small pot. 

When you raise preflop and make one bet on the flop with the intention of giving up, that's a small pot. 

When someone else raises preflop and you call with a small pocket pair, intending to throw it away if you don't flop a set, that's a small pot.

If it's large, it's yours.

When you do flop a set and get your whole stack in because the other guy has aces, that's a large pot.

When you re-raise preflop with aces and intend to bet all three streets postflop because the other guy never lays down kings and queens, that's a large pot.

When you make your flush and two players made weaker flushes, that's a large pot.

The small pots, if you study them carefully, will happen to be ones that you might win as often as you lose. The large pots, well those should only happen when you have your opponent hopelessly dominated. You have it, they have less, and cannot let it go.

And then there was a Ninja.

Small, large...wait, where are the medium pots? 

Medium pots separate the amateurs from the pros. I like to call them Ninja pots - not because they are made and won with acrobatic moves and flying shurikens, but because they are made and won under the radar. 

Stealth wins. When you have a big stack of chips and nobody can remember how you won all that money, I know they came from medium pots. And I know you're a Ninja.

A Ninja floats: When someone raises preflop, you call. He bets the flop, you call. He checks the turn, you bet. He folds. Medium pot to you.

A Ninja three-bets: when someone raises preflop, you re-raise. He calls. You bet the flop, he folds. Medium pot to you.

A Ninja squeezes:  Someone raises preflop, three people call, and you re-raise it to an uncomfortable amount. When they all fold, medium pot to you.

The Home Game Recipe.

Win one large pot. Throw in a few small pots. Sneak in a few medium pots. Shake well with a lot of anecdotes, and season it all with a smile.

If you can get through the night without a large pot, then you've done extremely well. Shun the big showdowns at the home game. Let the big fishes have all the highlight reels. Kenny Walker was an NBA Slam Dunk winner. Tim Duncan is a many-time NBA Champion. Who would you rather be?

Remember, steal his handkerchief, not his shirt. By the time he realizes it is gone, he is more likely to blame himself for losing it somewhere else. This is how Ninjas get invited back to the home game.

The Battle For Poker Supremacy

City of Dreams, Manila, Philippines 

So much can be said about the crescendoing drama of the ongoing battle for poker supremacy in the Philippines. The APPT in City of Dreams Manila, being the current battleground, would seem to be the centerpiece of this developing epic - with PokerStars standing gloriously under the spotlight of a record-breaking field - but as the Main Event winds down to its final two tables, the attention might soon be focused, not on one final table, but on two seats.

Imagine it.  In Seat One, wearing the Poker King brand: Winfred Yu. In Seat Four, directly across him, wearing the PokerStars brand: Mike Kim.  Aside from being heavily-respected for their abilities as poker players, both are known as powerhouses when it comes to poker industry mastery.

On the felt, the edge might go to the more experienced Korean-American.  Mike is a true veteran of the game whose collection of poker anecdotes are populated by names from the old guard: Brunson, Reese, even a certain Magician who once had the audacity to call him out for being too tight in an underground table. Winfred, although newer to the game (only halfway thru his second decade), is himself not lacking in terms of the big-names in his own circles: Ivey, Dwan, Antonius. 

On the floor, however, is where these two titans have had the more relevant encounters, and the odds have seemingly been in favor of the wily Chinese CEO from Canada. If the legends are true, Winfred's Poker King Clubs have consistently bolted tables down on floors supposedly laid out by Mike.

In a more recent sortie, it was Mike who reclaimed the upper hand when his team - unceremoniously ousted from Solaire Poker Room - set up shop across the road at PokerStarsLive Manila and proved without a doubt that a venue alone is not a recipe for smashing success.

The battle may continue in the undertones between these two visionaries with contrasting styles. One blazing trails with sheer force of will, and the other conquering with technique and precision. Whichever way the tides turns, we know that the industry will come out as the true winner - just for being blessed by the passion of these two pillars of poker.

Let's Make a Deal...

I have been on both sides of the staker-stakee relationship.  In recent years, I have been in the middle - negotiating between both parties to try to find the best solution.

It's not as simple as debating between 50-50 and 60-40.  If the stakee is winning, this is easy to negotiate.  The biggest issues have to do with accepting the realities of poker - mainly:  poker is a Looooong-term game, and the stakee can run bad.  Very bad.

Here are three items on my checklist when I arrange something between a staker and stakee - and I always make sure these are CLEAR BEFORE a single session is played - feel free to add items that you feel are of utmost importance...


1. Make sure the staker accepts the reputation of the stakee.
The basic phrase you are looking for the staker to say here is "I will trust this guy."   TOO MANY times I have had to listen to a staker come to me saying "What the bleep is this guy doing?  I thought he could play?"

Touch-move.  I am very black-and-white with trust.  You can't take it back.  You cannot tell a guy you trust him and then question him later just because he lost.  From day one, I need to make sure that everything about the stakee is on the table for the staker to accept or reject.  Once he accepts, he must trust the stakee.

Sometimes, the condition is "I'm not sure about you, but I'm going to give you a shot" - that's fine as long as that is on the table from the get-go, and a couple of other things are clear...

2. Make sure the expectations regarding the staking duration are crystal clear
A staker can go for a stop-loss/stop-win.  "Here is the roll, you bust that and we are done.  You double that and we are done."

"Done" means "let's re-negotiate."

I prefer roll-conditions to time/volume driven deals.  The end is very simple, and it is very easy to restart.  With a timed-deal, a stakee may go for broke if he is still down and the duration of the deal is nearing the end.  Or he may just stop playing to win and play a deliberate break-even style once he is satisfied with his wins.

If you still prefer a timed-deal, at least make sure the stakee asks for a finite number of sessions and that it is a decent volume - and don't accept any crap about "one month" or "three months" either.  We are talking number of hours or number of sessions.  Thirty sessions?  A hundred thousand hands?  Fifty tournaments?  Five hundred hours?  As long as it is quantifiable.  This can be tough for the staker, since the stakee can be losing huge and not even be halfway through the agreed duration.  Tough, but a deal is a deal - a stakee has to have a shot at reaping the benefits of the variance that is keeping him down.  You can't quit on him too soon, because another staker might benefit when the stakee finally starts running normal.

True story:  I had a guy get staked with no clear conditions to play a live grind.  He started awful and was about 50k in the hole before he turned it around and ended up being 100k up.  The stakee moved him to a bigger game, where he lost it all.  Staker gives up on the stakee.  Stakee moves to another stable and wins wins wins.  Now the previous staker is moaning and groaning to me:  "Now he starts winning?  When it is no longer my money?"

Your fault, staker.

Have a contract duration and stick to it.  It can be a roll-condition, a session-amount, a hybrid, or whatever you feel is creative and productive.  As long as you have a clear-cut end to the engagement.

I am not a fan of open-ended arrangements - the kind where a staker "rides him until he can't ride him no more" or even when a stakee "milks him till I have my own roll"

Too often this turns out to be "I can't let him go because he owes me too much"

The latter situations have been more common in my experience, and more disappointing for me as a professional.  Stakees who enter an agreement "to build my own roll" owe it to their stakers to define the duration they would like to be engaged.  Many stakees I know run well and then unceremoniously ditch their staker "so I keep all my action" - bad stakee, bad bad stakee!  Please appreciate that the staker deserves a premium for getting your careers rolling, give the staker due process and credit please!


3. Make sure you agree on how to deal with losses
Winning stakees are not a big deal.  You just split the winnings and keep going.  It is when they run bad that issues arise, so one of my main goals when mediating between staker and stakee is to make absolutely sure they have an answer to this question:

"WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT MAKE UP?"

How you answer this question will influence how you split the winnings.  You cannot even begin to talk about profit-share until this is crystal clear - after all, 50% OF ZERO IS ZERO.  What about 50% of negative 100k?!?

If a stakee doesn't want to deal with make up, I make sure the staker understands.  This is a motivation issue, and it is not just about the stakee being a selfish prick.  It's about security in a very insecure environment - and the security is mostly provided by the staker, because the talent and execution is provided by the stakee.

Let me play out this scenario, a monthly payout arrangement, and you tell me if it is common:

period one:  Stakee wins 100k, takes home 50k after the split.  Good job, good month.
period two:  Stakee loses 70k.  Is he supposed to give back the 50k he is already paid out?  Of course not.  does he take anything home?  Nada.  Dry month.
period three:  Stakee wins 55k.  This is where it starts to get tricky.  Still 15k down from the last profit-share point, so most of the time, the stakee will be awarded nothing.  Another dry month.
period four:  Stakee just about breaks even, winning 12k.  Still 3k under. Another dry month.  THREE MONTHS he has played his heart out and received nothing for his time.  Is this fair?
period five:  Stakee is up to 40k profit halfway thru and is excited for a payday, then the other half gets coolered and ends the period even.  Still 3k under, so yet another dry month.
period six:  Stakee's game is severely affected by four months of zero income.  Combined with a bit of run-bad, he ends the period losing another 30k.  Dry again.
period seven... The stakee just either disappears or the hole gets deeper.  With no light at the end of the tunnel, it just doesn't make sense for the stakee to continue.  There is no great incentive.  For six months he has wagered all his time.  Meanwhile, the staker has been going about business as usual because the money being played is invested anyway.  So even though the staker is just about even, it's not like he wasted six months of his life.

So what is fair?

No make-up, but 70-30 favoring the staker?  Make-up, but staker takes care of all basic needs (lodging, food)?  Make-up, with smaller payouts for winning periods while the make-up exists?  70-30 favoring the stakee but with black-and-white make-up?  Stop-loss with 50% make-up payable upon closure?

That last one may seem more like a loan that a staking deal, but a deal is a result of a dynamic process of negotiation between two rational creative human beings, so this is still a staking deal in my book.

I'd like to continue, but this is the part where everyone's input needs to be considered first - there are many creative ways to do this, and there are many thresholds for what is fair in the short, mid, and long term.  This has to do with other factors as well - the depth of the relationship between staker and stakee - history, intentions, conditions to provide basic needs, etc...


So what do you guys do about make up?