Poker Strategems: The Green Bay Kid Method

Last Friday, I got my ass WHOMPED in my first ever no-limit Texas Hold’em Tournament. I actually played pretty well, but I got burnt hard on two hands that, statistically, I should have won. Oh well.

Poker is kind of a funny phenomenon with its incredible rise in popularity over the last few years. I was recently perusing the newsstand section at Barnes & Noble and came across no less than THREE Poker related periodicals. I didn’t realize the game has changed so much that a monthly subscription was needed to replace that Rules to 7 Card Stud bonus card that you get along side the two jokers in a fresh pack of playing cards. A flush still beats a straight, right?

And forget about throwing the game winning touchdown in the Super Bowl; that was your Dad’s fantasy before he started to live vicariously through you. Nowadays, men fantasize about going “all-in” against Johnny Chan, Phil Helmuth, or that dude that looks ridiculously like Tiger Woods in the World Series of Poker at the Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Never in the history of time has sitting on one’s ass ever been considered an athletic competition but the programming directors at ESPN will have you think otherwise. I better start drinking and smoking more if I want to be ready for the Championship in 2007.

I kid, I kid. Poker involves a lot of skill, strategy, and lightning-quick probability reasoning. That’s why you see the same guys win these tournaments year after year. Here are some lessons I’ve gleaned on my own so that you can become a poker champion.

1.) No matter how grammatically correct your vernacular is, announcing your intention to play in a Texas Hold Them Tournament will NOT make you sound smarter, in fact, you will look like a complete jackass. Believe me, I know.

2.) You’re going to want to give yourself a nickname, preferably something Texas sounding-ish but a nickname based a different city or state will work fine too. When I sat down at my table on Friday and introduced myself as the “The Green Bay Kid”, I could tell that at least one guy at the table was slightly intimidated.

3.) Never fold out of turn, that’s just annoying.

4.) Every guy wants to be the Matt Damon character from the movie Rounders. You know, the guy that can sit down at a poker table and instantly know exactly what every player has in their hands based on their facial expressions. Even though every player has a “tell”, I still think it’s pure Hollywood when a guy can read that another player has a pair of 6’s, the 2 of hearts, the 9 of spades, the Queen of clubs or something crazy like that after the other player looks at his hand for two seconds.

But I do think a viable Poker strategy is to pretend to be THAT guy on every hand even though you have absolute no idea what’s going on:

Ben: I’m going to raise $100. Bill, you’re chasing a dream with that inside straight draw, and Steve, you know as well as I do that your pair of nines is not going to hold up at the showdown.
Dealer: Um, sir, I haven’t dealt the cards yet.
Ben: Whoops, sorry ‘bout that, fellas. I got a little excited there.

Anyways, make sure the cards are actually dealt before you start asserting what everyone has in their hand. You are sure to confuse your opponents with your peculiar demeanor and irregular betting habits using this strategy and being unpredictable is always good. You might just annoy your way to victory as well.

5. Bluffing is another good strategy; just make sure to only bluff when you have a great hand to back it up.

6. Finally, use Poker lingo whenever possible to describe your hand, i.e. say you have a pair of ladies when you have a pair of queens. When in doubt, make stuff up. You can be logical like calling the 8 of spades and the 8 of clubs, a pair of 8-balls, or call a pair of 4’s, a pair of Favre’s.

The best, though, is when you make up something really abstract and random, like having a 3 and a 9 in your hand before the flop, and calling it the ol’ monkey goblin or something like that. If someone asks you where the term originated from, just shrug and say, “I don’t know, I didn’t make it up,” and then smugly look at him, like HE is the idiot for not knowing what a monkey goblin is.

If you follow these pointers, you are sure to be a big hit at your next Hold’em tournament. Who knows, maybe someday you’ll be going all-in with a monkey goblin against James Bond at the infamous Casino Royale…



Maybe if you get good enough at Poker, you can start wearing uber-lame little boy short swimsuits, too. Kidding, there are probably about five men in the whole world that can pull off this look, and YOU are not one of them.