Poker Articles

At the poker table, we win by imposing our will on our opponents.  We try to make other players call, raise or fold based on our actions.  The mantra “aggressive poker is winning poker” breeds in all of us a little fighting machine.  The best of us are Bruce Lee; the worst look more like Daffy Duck as Robin Hood.  Ho, ha-ha, guard, turn, parry, dodge, spin, ha, raise.  Hiieeeeeeeeee-yaaaaaaahhhhhhh!

But what to do when you’re at a table full of Bruces or Daffys, splashing chips around as if they cause a skin rash when held too long?  Without a doubt, more frustration is caused by players who call pre-flop re-raises with A9 offsuit than all other poker maladies put together.  The “call of the donkey” rings out from $1 SNG tables all the way up to the highest echelons of tournament poker.  Listen to pros complain about short starting stacks and terrible players in WSOP prelim events and you’ll see what I mean.  Players everywhere are crying out for a new fighting style; let me humbly suggest aikido as a starting point for inspiration on the green felt.

“Aiki” is a Japanese phrase meaning “harmonious way” (the ending “do” means “the path of”).  Master Morihei Ueshiba developed the aikido style out of judo and jiujitsu, incorporating his religious philosophies of beauty and tranquility in life into a new fighting art.  Aikido is designed to use your attacker’s aggression and momentum against him in a positive direction, so you use the minimum amount of effort to inflict maximum damage.  If your opponent lunges, you don’t push back or deflect the blow; you apply even more force in the same direction, sending them off-balance and tumbling out of control.  The goal is to move in the opposite direction as your opponent expects; with them, not against them.

Playing the opposite of your opponent should be the goal at a poker table as well.  It is well-documented what to do if our opponents are weak-tight.  You run them over, betting and raising as often as you can…Bruce Lee poker.  Countering a loose-aggressive Bruce Lee style from your opponents, however, does not mean to play weak-tight, waiting meekly for cards to come your way.  Anyone who has seen aikido knows it is not a passive martial art.  Your poker style should never be passive either.

Your strategy should be about letting your opponent make their standard play, and then playing back at them when they are most vulnerable and uncomfortable.   A Bruce Lee opponent does much of his maneuvering pre-flop, establishing the tone for the entirety of a hand with a raise or a re-raise.  With the lower-quality Daffy Duck opponents, EVERYTHING is pre-flop play; they’re afraid of the flop and just want to bully you around.  So we’ll start the definition of Aikido Poker with a 3-part pre-flop strategy to prevent your opponents from achieving their goals:

1) If Bruce (or Daffy) has position on you, be extra-selective about your starting hand requirements.  If there is a hand you would normally raise, limp and call Bruce’s/Daffy’s raise.  If there is a hand you’d normally limp and call a raise, fold.  You want to throw them off the scent of your big hands.

2) If you have position on Bruce/Daffy, loosen your starting hand requirements.  If your opponent is a pre-flop player, you want to use position to take hands out of his comfort zone, to the flop and beyond.

3) Be calling more than re-raising.  This not only hides the strength of your monster hands, but saves you chips trying to buy pots of an opponent who won’t fold his good-but-not-great hand.  Depending on how the rest of the table plays, you will want to protect AA, KK and QQ against 4-way pots by re-raising.  But if it looks like you’re the only one who wants to stand up to the bully, call, call, call.

I’d like to say I came up with this approach completely on my own, but as with every good idea, Aikido Poker is a strategy borrowed from many sources.  Mike Caro has written about how to deal with a bluffer for many years; his philosophy of “bet less, call more” is at the heart of Aikido Poker.  You can also learn a lot from watching two master practitioners of the art, Daniel Negreanu and Gavin Smith.  In the 2006 WSOP, Negreanu says he re-raised pre-flop once in his 4-day run deep into the Main Event.  Smith has been very vocal on his podcasts about how limping and calling with any two cards, good or bad, is the key to his small-pot poker success.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence both of these men are amongst the more serene, comfortable people you’ll find at a poker table.  Trying to push back against an avalanche is stressful, painful work.  Thirty years ago, in “Super/System”, Doyle Brunson wrote about the confusion and discomforts created by a steady stream of bets and raises, and the point still holds true today.  With Aikido Poker, we reduce our stress and pain by not worrying when Bruce or Daffy wants us to worry.  We flow with the first movement (calling rather than re-raising), and put the fight on a battleground where we are more comfortable.

Next time, we’ll talk about flop and turn play, dealing with continuation bets, and how stack sizes affect the strategy.  Until then, sayonara and arigato.