James A. McKenna - Beyond Bluffs: Master The Mysteries Of Poker

S OME SKILLS THAT poker players develop are obvious. This book will discuss those and will go further into the mysterious skills that some players have and others are lacking. Many poker players will say that they would rather be lucky than good. However, the professionals know that luck is short term and in the long run, poker skills will win. In the long haul, a player must have the discipline to play, fold, and bluffand at the right times. Some of these skills come from years of experience. Others come from abilities to observe things on a deeper and more mysterious level. This book explores such mysteries as knowing how and when a player is bluffing and the most effective bluffs that fit the person being bluffed.

Ordinary skills on the top of the list include the skills of patience and the ability to handle boredom . The willingness to wait for the right cards, the right position, and the right odds to come around must be combined with the ability to handle boredomnot an easy task for the many players who are there in search of excitement. Learning to do other things while you are waiting for good cards will help reduce boredom and enhance your game. This book will teach you how to look for clues, how to listen for those clues, and how to track behaviors when a person is bluffing or telling the truth.

Extraordinary skills come to the player who also has advanced people skills. Without people skills, even the most informed player will be wanting. Previously, with my book Beyond Tells , I introduced for the first time a unique way of integrating personality types with reading tells. This book is designed to not only continue to enhance your people skills, but to deepen your awareness of people perceptions that you didnt know you were capable of learning. In addition to the integration of personality types, this book will integrate frames of references . Knowing how players think and make sense of the world (cards and other players) around them are extraordinary skills that come with advanced people skills.

Patience is a realistic attitude, one in which you expect to win only one or two pots every hour. It means sitting through the garbage hands and not playing out of boredom. Patience is also knowing when to bluff and having the fortitude not to telegraph your hand by betting a good hand too soon. However, a poker player needs a more advanced skill to know when to stop being patient and to act on opportunities to bluff.

Advanced skills require creative contempt for ordinary poker bluffs. I met a successful self-taught artist when I worked as a psychotherapist. He had an expression that Ive never forgotten. He said, Creativity comes from my contempt. I was discussing his rebellious tendencies.

My response was What?

Yeah, contempt is the mother of my creativity.

He explained that he looks at something and will have contempt for it as it is. Then, he will create something better. How does creative contempt fit into poker as a mystery? Most good players will play patiently and wait for high-odds cards to play. Some better players will have contempt for just playing cards that way and wait more for the right opportunity and the right person to bluff. They may have fairly high-odds cards (semi-bluffing) or they may have garbage. The difference is that good players have developed people skills and will play people as well as cardsif not better. We will develop the notion of creative bluffs used with players of all varieties.

A patient player sits back while other players knock each other out in tournaments. Being patient is playing the waiting game. If you are there to socialize or to get more excitement in your life, patience will slow you down to be satisfied with occasional excitements. This is true of low-limit games. However, when playing pot-limit or no-limit games, excitement occurs more often. In these games it is possible to protect a good hand and not be beaten by someone who impatiently plays bad cards. In lower limit games, more players will tend to chase hands (regardless of odds) since the cost is not too high. Even the skill of patience varies when players are bluffing and when they have what they are representing. We will discuss this difference.

Playing without the patience needed to become a consistent winner is a way to trap ones self. Playing as if each hand is the first hand of the day will be a way to develop needed patience. Its a fact that the cards have no memory and are coming out in random ways. So, the odds of getting two playable cards and having an edge with position are events that seldom happen together. Good fortune is rare in poker. Bad fortune is the norm. Playing aggressively with garbage hands will work for a while; however, in the long run, it will result in misfortune. You will learn when, how, and against whom to bluff with garbage. It is my hope you will learn not to waste bluffs. This includes avoiding bluffing when you dont have to and bluffing more effectively in ways that fit your opponents.

Not playing cards that could trap you into chasing improbable odds is a skill to be patiently sought. It requires avoiding the temptation to play No Fold em Hold em when the game gets boring. Waiting can be replaced with thinking about what other players are doing and how the cards are coming out. Boredom is often the cause of drifting and day dreaming. There are ways to stay centered and to avoid dreamland.

When you read a good mystery novel, its not a mystery after youve discovered all the clues and tied together the informationboth exposed and hidden. After you discover the clues to look for in poker, you, too, will unravel the mysteries of the game.

James A. McKenna, Ph.D.
a.k.a. Jimmy Mac

W ITHOUT THE IDEAS , support, and inspiration of far too many to list, this project would still only be a great idea. When people receive public awards and start naming individuals to whom they are grateful, it never seems to fail that someone very important is forgotten. There are far too many people to thank for their support and encouragement than I can name or remember. I am, however, extremely grateful for the dozens of behind-the-scene assistants. Because of many, I believe together we have produced a lasting reference that defines the life and times of persons at their best and at their worst. Poker brings such extremes out in all of us. The use of deception needed to become a successful poker player has driven us into the realm of magic and advanced communications. For that I am grateful to the pioneers whose contributions to this work are documented throughout and in the Suggested Readings. Without such advances by mental health and communication experts this work could not have been realized. Its the first time that certain ideas have been applied to poker. Its not the first time they have been successfully applied in counseling and hypnotherapies.

During my research, the many players and their frank answers to my probing questions have made this work much more real and valuable. Thanks to those hundreds I have played with and those who answered my questions. Your contributions will be obvious when you read this book. I learned when playing tennis to always compete with better players than me if I wanted to improve my game. I especially want to thank the many better players whom I have studied and learned from. This gratitude includes those whom Ive watched bluff and those whom I experimented on with varied bluffing styles. In this book I describe examples that I gathered in my research. I have taken great care to disguise real identities. Sometimes I even changed the sex and ages of people in my stories. Some of you made some money on my research as I explored the world of bluffing in poker. Some veteran players also discovered that I too could improve. Still, I have remained a poker player trapped in a writer/psychologists body.