Don't Listen To Phil Hellmuth: Part 1

My brother, Hugh Jarce, used to play poker at the casinos in Bournemouth way back in the good ol' days of the late 1980s. We're talking of the days when only a handful of well-informed individuals knew what they were doing. My brother may not have been an expert but generally knew the right moves. Now back in those days he'd tell me of the meaty wins he'd have and of the days when Japenese tourists would visit the poker tables and would just throw money away like it was confetti. He would generally do very well but stopped playing when the regulars made it unpleasant for other players who were not part of their group (that was his excuse anyway).

Now my brother, Hugh, missed the boat when it came to grabbing the opportunities that life throws at us. He was a computer geek way back when hardly anyone knew what a computer was; he was one of the first owners of the ZX81 and, as technology progressed with the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, wrote programs that were admired and possibly ahead of their time. His thing was crushing video games - and we're talking arcade games back in the 1980s. For example, he'd memorise all the patterns, inside out, of where the pacman should go in the Pacman video game; master it, clock it and make the 10p last until the screen would go all funny. He was probably one of the first in the country to clock games like Space Invaders and Defender and he could stay on games like Joust and Mr Do for as long as the arcade would stay open or for as long as he could stand on his own two feet. That's a lot of video game for 10p! He even won a trip to San Francisco after winning a competition at the arcade racing game, Daytona USA. (Yours truly got to go as part of the package as well - bosh!)

Now while some may argue that these activities are a complete waste of brains and are skills that might not actually get you anywhere in life (apart from free trips to San Francisco), it was his knowledge of computer programming that allowed him to suss out how to read the games in a different way and, hence, how to "beat the game"; and I mean that in the old fashioned sense of those words and not the namby-pamby way in which those words are used today. (He now bemoans the "Fisher Price" mentality of computer gaming where they are dumbed-down to the point where ANYBODY and EVERYBODY can play and master them - but that's another issue.) Although my brother knows computers pretty well - and could make a pretty penny if he had the right drive (pun not intended) - he has chosen not to exploit these talents to make his money.    

Now the other thing he also has/had (but has chosen not to develop and to make dosh out of) is/were decent poker skills. One of his claims to fame was that in the first year that The Mind Sports Olympiad held poker tournaments (pre-Moneymaker in 1999), he won two of the nine events and was placed 1st, 2nd or 3rd in four out of nine of them. (This is an amateur event and no real money changed hands - only medals.) He occasionally plays online poker today at micro-stakes levels but has NEVER put real money into a poker site claiming all sorts of reasons why not.

This brings me to the main crux of the matter in this rambling post about my insane brother. What it is, is he claims that you can't really learn the game from reading poker books. In fact, every time I proudly show him my latest acquisition to my poker library, he takes a quick leaf through it and says words to the effect of; "Well, there ya go ya see look, there's one flaw right there..." and things like "Well, who's to say that's the right thing to do there, what about variable x, y and z?..." etc etc etc. I feel he MUST have read something back in the early days which clicked, but, to my knowledge, I don't think he's read a poker book in his life.

------------- 

I'll continue with Part 2 of this load of ol' twaddle in one of my upcoming posts and also get round to connecting it with the title. Until then, I need to get off this computer and do something else for a while...