Strong means weak, right?

I was just reading through the archives of a poker blog I've newly discovered, one that I'm liking a lot so far, and about which I'll tell you more later. For now, though, it's enough that a story there reminded me of an embarrassing, but, in retrospect, valuable lesson that I learned in one of my first attempts at playing poker in a casino.

I was living in Minnesota. About 90 minutes away in western Wisconsin was an Indian casino that held a weekly no-limit hold'em tournament for, I think, $50. I went to it pretty regularly. It had largely the same people playing every week, capped at about 70. (Small poker room.) I had read one or two poker books and watched the WPT regularly. Felt like I knew what I was doing (though I now realize that I had absolutely no clue--poker is like that, making you feel like you've got it pretty well figured out at every stage of your development).

I don't remember any details of the hand in question, except that there was a woman who was exhibiting all of the classic "tells" of weakness, in that she was acting strong. She was fast and emphatic and forceful about all of her movements, leaning forward, looking smugly right at me, etc. I had some mediocre crap, but she so perfectly fit the profile I had read and heard about--that acting strong means the player is bluffing--that I just knew I could call her down and win. I wasn't born yesterday! You can't fool me that easily, lady--I've read books, y'know!

Except that, oops, there's something that wasn't mentioned in those books and in Mike Sexton's commentaries (or at least I didn't remember it): Sure, the Hollywooding types who fit that "strong means weak" profile are pretty low on the ladder of skill and experience, else they would know how ineffective a ruse it is. But once in a while you run into somebody who is even lower on the ladder than that, and doesn't even have the good sense to try to disguise his or her weakness with signs of strength, and vice-versa.

These people are not being tricky. They are being transparent.

The woman in question in this hand was one of them. After I had called off nearly all of my chips to her, she turned over the flopped nuts and doubled up. I distinctly remember getting strange looks from several other players, which, if translated into words, would have said, roughly, "You moron--couldn't you tell she had the goods from how she looked?"

I had out-thought the situation. I was not exactly a deep thinker about poker back then, but I was thinking one level above where my opponent was, which is just as fatal an error as thinking one level below where one's opponent is. It's like when playing Roshambo. You have to know whether your opponent is (1) somebody who will always throw Rock the first time, (2) somebody who knows you think he will throw Rock the first time and will therefore go Scissors to catch your Paper, or (3) some other meta-level beyond that. Thinking one level too deep there is as deadly as thinking one level too shallow.

Several weeks after my embarrassing discovery, I was starting to become friendly with a local semi-pro who played at that casino a lot. I told her my story. She laughed, and agreed that that player was perhaps the most transparent regular the place had, but that there was no way to know that other than to watch her, then see her cards, and make the connection.

Of course, you have to discover that sort of thing by experience.

Fortunately, I'm now at least a little bit better at sensing the distinction between strong-means-strong transparency and strong-means-weak Hollywooding. But it was disconcerting and embarrassing to discover that I couldn't just interpret a given type of action in one way all the time. Dang--this game may be harder than I thought!

Just when I had come to expect that everything about poker was an attempt to deceive me, I found out that that's not quite so.