Monkey poker (non-grumpy content)

In the November issue of Bluff magazine, Justin Bonomo describes playing a tournament at the Borgata while on "super monkey tilt." I had never heard that phrase before, but I took an instant liking to it. I think I'm more resistant to tilting than most players, though by no means completely immune. I'm not quite growing hairy arms or flinging my own poo around, but I have total empathy with the concept of "super monkey tilt."

That phrase reminded me of another I heard sometime last year. One player had a friend who was just sitting down and asked about the play at the table. The guy who had been there for a while said, "The monkeys are swinging from the trees." I loved that. It's so true sometimes.

I remember a few months ago when the king of the monkeys came to the Hilton. I was just about to leave, because I had been spinning my wheels for a few hours, not able to build a profit, when a guy came in and sat down on my right, which is the prime spot for milking a less-experienced player. Everything about him screamed novice: he didn't know what the blinds were, didn't know what to do with his chips, always had to ask what his options were, etc. He bought in for the minimum, which is something that almost no experienced players will do (because it so severely cramps how you can play and how much you can win). He even said out loud several times, "I have no idea what I'm doing. I only play 5-card draw at home." And he wasn't sandbagging--he really was clueless, didn't even know whether he had won a hand or not until the dealer would tell him. So I stayed.

You know how in cartoons, when somebody sees an opportunity to make a lot of money fast, their pupils change into dollar signs, and you hear the cash register bell going "cha-ching"? That was me.

But this monkey won, and he won, and he won. He just kept calling everything. A couple of players kept trying to bluff him off of pots, and he would just call with minimal hands--then turn out to have the winner at the end. Or he'd catch incredibly lucky cards on the river to make a winning hand. And a couple of times--seemingly almost at random--he's suddenly announce "all in," which would cause everyone to fold, because it was impossible to know what he had. He turned $50 to over $300 in less than an hour, and to about $400 over the next hour.

Since almost none of it was my money, I was having a great time watching. It was really, really funny to watch how it frustrated the people who were losing to him. Naturally, I kept encouraging him by telling him "nice hand" when he won. When he'd say, "I don't know what I'm doing," I'd tell him, "That's the beauty of this game--you're just as likely as anybody else to wind up with the best hand."

You can't bluff a bad player. They don't know how to read the messages you're sending. They don't have enough experience to know that, e.g., top pair with a bad kicker isn't a hand to call a big raise with. So they call, and if you have less than that, you lose.

I knew, though, that the lucky streak couldn't last, and I'd get my fair share of his accumulated booty if I just picked my spots carefully. And sure enough, when he was down to about $200, I got a series of three big hands in 20 minutes or so. He'd check, I'd bet, he'd call all the way down, and nearly all of his last $200 came into my stack. Of course, I'd just shake my head, say, "Sorry, I caught a lucky hand on you there." He was very nice about it--completely an "easy come, easy go," "oh, well" kind of attitude.

It's ironic, sort of. I really took very little of his own money. He was just like the conduit for getting the other players' chips to me--the people who tried to push him around, or weren't cautious when there were possible draws on the board that he might hit. They lost the chips to him, then I took them when I was in a dominating position. It was as if the whole thing had been orchestrated. It made for an unusually enjoyable and profitable day.

I guess you could say that the monkey put most of the table on super monkey tilt.