Several years ago I spent a wonderful few hours playing against Mike Caro, the self-described "Mad Genius of Poker". The new Casino Morongo had just opened up - the paint still smelled fresh and the poker chips had hardly been handled. To celebrate their new digs, the casino hosted one of those invitational for TV only poker tournaments which have become so popular, but at the time was a new thing. The actual games themselves where done in a private room, but a lot of the players, like Scotty Nguyen and Mike Caro, would drop down and visit the poker room.
Mostly the casino ran a 1/2 NL game (before NL became so exclusively the poker game of choice) as well as 2-5, but most of the games were limit. When Caro came in management opened a new $5-10 game. I'd done well, was up over $1k at the 2-5 game I was sitting at, and decided to take a shot at the higher stakes with the famous poker personality.
Boy, did I get an education.
Basically Caro was sitting next to someone, and he was talking the guy through some hands, explaining his thinking processes. Caro was one of the first one to tutor "students". In this case everybody who was listening was getting advanced-level theory of poker, simply for the price of a table buy-in.
About 30-minutes in, I decided to take a shot. I ran a bluff against Caro on the turn after he had raised preflop. It was an innocuous board, and I doubted he had hit anything. After my aggressive raise Caro started analyzing the hand, the play of the flop, and the fact that my turn bet "seemed odd." He said "He has either flopped a monster hand or he has nothing and is making a play at me with a naked bluff. Since I don't know, my hand is strong enough to play." He called. Check-check after another innocuous river card and he showed an over pair for a nice pot.
I learned several very important lessons that day.
1) That was the first time I had really seen an advanced player really think through a hand before making a decision. Not just think in a disorganized way, but to replay in their mind all the different actions and aspects of a hand in an organized, logical, systemic manner, before making a decision for their action.
2) It was really the first time that it came home the difference between playing Your Cards versus playing the Other Person's Cards. I'd heard it, especially from reading Doyle Brunson's Super System, and did i to some extent in my own way, but the first time I had seen it in action by an advanced player.
3) I needed to learn more from this guy, Mike Caro.
I thought I'd bring this up because after I had lost my buy in, I spent a lot more time reading theorists like Sklansky, Hilger and Caro, which elevated my game. Learning about the game has helped me. I still regularly peruse book stores and amazon.com for new things to read to make me better. After my session with Mike Caro, when I lost money but gained a wealth of knowledge, I bought one of his books. I ran across it this morning while surfing Amazon, so I thought I'd link it for those interested. It is a great book, dated in some ways, but a true classic.
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