Experimenting With The Maniacal Style At Graton

One of the reasons I believe that I continue to improve even as I approach 50 is my willingness to get outside of my comfort zones and try new things to see if what I’m doing in any of my chosen fields of endeavour can be improved upon. For example, yesterday in Flight B of Graton’s $400 $200k Guarantee event, I experimented with the maniacal style. For my entire poker career I have been a tight aggressive player patiently waiting for hands and pushing them when I get them. Otherwise, I’ve stayed out of the fray.

But starting at the WPT World Championships at the Wynn last December, I started to wonder if I couldn’t add to my game. The stimulus was the great Chance Kornuth. On Twitter, Kornuth said that he was looking to back players but would not back nits. He wanted a big score, not a min cash, he tweeted. I remember thinking that he wouldn’t back be because I am a nit. Then I watched Chance on the livestream to see exactly what he does in certain spots. It was an eye opening experience. You can’t deny that what Chance does works. All you have to do is look at his results. Chance will be 38 next month and already has about $16 milllion in live tournament cashes.

Coming into Graton (located in Rohnert Park, CA), I am extremely hot having won 3 of the last 4 tournaments I played at Bay 101 over the last two weeks for more than $22,000 in profit. The biggest score was last Saturday when I took 3rd in a 6-way chop in the April $1000 last Saturday of the month tournament for $15,850 – my largest live cash to date exceeding the $12,700 I won at Graton last August.

I arrived from the Bay Area just in time for the first hand. And I immediately started raising almost every hand and crushing the table. It just happened spontaneously. I hadn’t formulated any plan to do so. For whatever reason, I just started doing it. And it worked. By the end of the first four 30-minute levels, I had tripled my 25,000 starting stack.

How was I able to do this? It goes back to the blog I wrote ahead of this year’s $5200 Bay 101 Rising Star which I had satellited into and had a good showing at: “Nits Don’t Win – But Neither Do Maniacs: The Enduring Case For Tight Aggressive” (March 26, Top Gun Financial). One of the fundamental facts of poker is that your hand misses the flop or connects with it marginally more often than it smashes it. It rarely smashes it. Maniacs understand this and take advantage of it by pushing their opponents off of marginal hands – regardless of what they themselves have.

The difference between a world class maniac like Chance and your average table captain is that Chance knows when to get away from a hand while the bully does not. The world class maniac steals hand after hand while his opponent folds his marginal holdings. But when a tight opponent plays back, the world class maniac knows to get out of the way. The average table captain does not and ends up getting all his chips in as a huge underdog, usually giving everything back that he’s slowly accumulated through stealing in one big hand.

And so I went to work stealing pot after pot, getting out of the way when I faced resistance and making huge bets when I had a hand and thought I might get paid because my opponent did too. That’s another thing: maniacs make big hands too and get paid off because they are bluffing so much of the time. While I shifted back into my more usual tight aggressive style when I lost a few hands, my stack dwindled and the blinds got bigger relative to my stack, I still had a more than 200,000 chips on the bubble with 33 players left out of 256.

I raised with AA and a solid opponent I’d played with a lot – Mikhail Sniatovskii – 3-bet me big. I knew he had a hand so I shoved all in and he called with KK. Unfortunately a King came in the window and I was eliminated on the bubble. Another player with a shorter stack was ellimated at another table on the same hand so perhaps I did get a min cash. I left abrupty last night but I’ll find out about that today. Sniatovskii finished with the biggest stack from flight B. Had my Aces held up it would have been me that was the Flight B chipleader heading into Day 2 on Sunday.

I wasn’t that upset, however, because it happens and, more importantly, I learned something that will serve me well going forward. By successfully playing the most maniacal poker of my life during the first two hours, I got a better understanding of how to do it. All those tight players were waiting to make big hands and I was happy to take their chips while they waited. And I’ll keep doing it going forward which is going to make me a much more dangerous player than I’ve been in the past.