• How To Win Friends Audio
• How To Always Win Poker

Apr 06, 2011  This educational resource is a suitable time-saver that will enable you to get good at casino gambling, card games, poker. Watch our instructional video on How To Plan A Poker Night With Friends. Mar 02, 1995  Directed by James Burrows. With Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc. As Rachel interviews for a new job, the girls take on the guys in a game of poker.

This week I’m dipping back into my “Casino Poker for Beginners” series to warn about a practice that is common among players new to poker, who engage in it innocently, not realizing that it is both unethical and a violation of one of the most important rules of the game. That practice is collusion.

A typical example is two friends heading to the casino to spend a few hours playing poker together. They’re worried that the cutthroat nature of the game — a game in which the whole point, after all, is to win the other players’ money — may cause hard feelings and damage their friendship if they really go at each other hard. So they make a deal to prevent this.

The deal may take any of several forms.

• Maybe if one of them puts in a raise, the other has to drop out of the pot.
• Maybe they’ll never bluff each other, so that a strong bet always indicates a strong hand.
• Maybe they’ll never slow play each other when dealt a monster hand.
• Maybe they’ll use a secret hand signal to indicate “I’ve got the goods this time, so you should fold and let me take these other people’s chips.”
• Maybe if they end up as the only two in a hand, they’ll always just check every street rather than betting and raising each other.

For our purposes, all of these agreements, plus many other forms they might take, are equal — and equally wrong.

Poker is not a team sport. It is an intensely individualistic, dog-eat-dog game. In fact, poker doesn’t even work right if the players don’t approach it with that attitude. Over the last ten years of the “poker boom,” many organizations have tried to put together forms of poker that use teams, often for the purposes of making exciting television. None has been that successful. Introducing collusion, wherein a player tries to help or at least not hurt specific other players, tends to distort the essence of the game so much the result is often barely recognizable as poker.

I think it’s important to state this bluntly: Collusion in poker between two or more players, in all of its many forms, is always cheating, pure and simple. You should never engage in it, never agree to it, and actively warn others against it if they propose that you join them. Furthermore, if you suspect that collusion is occurring at your table — whether the culprits are friends or strangers to you — you should report it to the poker room management. Both your personal integrity and the integrity of the game require these things of you.

As Mike Caro once correctly pointed out in an article on the subject, “when you soft play friends at the table others get hurt in the crossfire.” In other words, trying to make things easier for a friend often amounts to making things unfairly difficult for others at the table.

“Aggressive opponents, who are playing honestly, especially suffer,” Caro continues. “That’s because they mistake what’s happening through secret alliances as tactical traits exhibited by the group of friends. This causes those honest players to make poor decisions for the wrong reasons on future hands.”

There is only one kind of agreement you should make with friends before sitting down at a poker table with them: You will all do everything in your ability (and within the rules, of course) to win all of each other’s money, just as you will do against all of the other players. However the cards and chips may fall, there will be no hard feelings about it, and you will leave the game just as much friends as when you sat down, regardless of who won or lost.

If you can’t make and stick to that kind of deal with your friends, then you cannot play poker with them — period. And that’s perfectly fine! I understand and appreciate that, for example, some married couples just can’t stand to play hard against each other, because each finds it too stressful to inflict pain and loss on his or her partner. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having that kind of relationship. It just means that you can’t play poker against each other.

If you’re playing cash games, you can decide simply to be at different tables — problem solved. In a tournament, however, you don’t get to control table assignments, which means that you can’t enter a tournament with any other person against whom you cannot agree to compete full-bore.

It has been said that there are no friends at a poker table. I understand the point of that aphorism, but I’m too literal-minded to approve of it. Of course you can have friends at the poker table — both ones that you came with and ones that you make while playing. In fact, friends make poker more fun.

The only requirement is that you not play compete less fully against them because they’re your friends.

Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the “Poker Grump” blog.

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  Mike Caro

I was invited to be a guest on a recent episode of the Top Pair podcast, which focuses primarily on home poker games. The experience got me thinking about the ways in which home games are different from casino games, and, in particular, what you have to do differently to succeed in home games.

It is a truth about poker — so much so that it’s nearly a cliché — that it’s all just one long game. But where the rubber meets the road, that is more true for home games than for casino poker. In casinos, though there will be some regulars that you see many times, most of your opponents will be strangers with whom you play only once. But in home games, you can expect the lineup to stay constant for months or even years. That fact makes an enormous difference.

When you’re playing in a casino, you don’t have to worry about being able to come back. Of course you can come back, anytime you want, provided that your conduct has not been so egregiously bad that you get 86’ed. But at a home game, you have to be invited to return.

One goal, then — a primary one, in fact — when attending a home game is to get invited back to play again. The game cannot be a long-term source of profit for you if you’re not invited back.

The first time I attended a home poker game, I completely failed at this task. I made some decent money, but it was one-and-done. When I got a group email announcing the next game and answered it expressing my interest, the host quickly replied, telling me that I had been included in the email list by mistake, and asking me not to show up. I never learned who I had offended, or how, but clearly I had screwed up, and turned a potential ongoing revenue stream into a one-time memory.

Some time after that — after moving to a new city — I blew it again. I was having breakfast by myself at a restaurant, when a man at the next table noticed my PokerStars sweatshirt and started chatting with me on his way to the exit. I learned that he was a long-time participant in a local game played at a country club. My impression was that the stakes, game selection, and competition would likely hit my sweet spot of advantage. I turned from being annoyed at his intrusion into my quiet meal to hoping he’d invite me to play.

It was not to be. This time, though, I know exactly how I messed up. He asked me whether I played tight or loose. I didn’t think about the consequences of answering truthfully, and told him that I usually have a classic tight-aggressive style. He responded by launching into a lecture about how tight players ruin the game. They’re there to have fun, he explained, and it’s no fun to have somebody who folds, folds, folds, and puts money in only when they have a lock on the hand. Pretty quickly, he drew the conversation to a conclusion — without inviting me to join in.

Which leads to the first point about how to get invited to a game — or invited back after your first time: give action. Nits are no fun. If you’re no fun, you’re less likely to be given the nod to play again.

This doesn’t mean that you need to go to the other extreme and become the table maniac. But you should strive to be at least averagely active — especially your first time or two at a particular game. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to be caught bluffing once in a while. Rebuy conspicuously, and frequently if needed. Don’t hit and run if you make an early profit, but help keep the game going as long as other people — and the host — want it to.

The other key to being invited back is to be sociable. Again, these people come together to play because it’s fun. If you’re not enjoyable to spend time with, why would they choose to have you around?

To that end:

• Learn people’s names — and call them by name so that they know you remember them.
• Bring food or drinks.
• Take an interest in the people sitting around the table. With any luck, they will become your friends.
• Never criticize how somebody else plays, or advise them on how to play better. They didn’t invite you there to give lessons.
• If you win a big pot, don’t boast about how well you played it. Instead, be humble and emphasize how lucky you got.
• If you lose a big pot, be a good sport about it.
• Laugh at people’s jokes, and make a few of your own.
• Don’t critique how the game is run, or suggest improvements or modifications, at least until you’ve been going long enough that you’re an established regular.
• Look for small ways to make the game go more smoothly, such as being quick and eager to make change, taking extra turns shuffling, etc.
• If a dispute arises, be your most diplomatic self. Let the host and regulars settle the matter however they’re accustomed to handling such things, even if it isn’t “by the book” or the way a casino would resolve it.
• Don’t flaunt your knowledge of rules, strategy, history, or current events related to poker. Such displays do not impress, but intimidate others who are not as deeply steeped in the game, and being intimidated is incompatible with having fun.
• If you’re allowed to bring guests, make sure they are people who will similarly add to the conviviality of the game, not be wet blankets or boors.
• Be profuse in your appreciation to the host(s) for opening their home to you.

If you do these things, you will likely be a welcome participant over the long run, even if you simultaneously achieve your other goal of taking more money out of the game than you put in. Recreational players like to win, of course, but don’t much mind losing to somebody who makes the game a pleasure to be a part of. Being that person is your primary task as a home game player.

(By the way, if you’re curious to hear me on Top Pair, I’m on the April 4, 2015 episode.)

How To Win Friends Audio

^{Photo: Shad Bolling. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.}

Robert Woolley lives in Asheville, NC. He spent several years in Las Vegas and chronicled his life in poker on the “Poker Grump” blog.

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How To Always Win Poker

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