Page 16 - July 2005 • Southern California Gaming Guide

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GAMING GUIDE
Coming to Terms with Poker by Jim Mercurio
I was walking from the MGM Grand’s new poker room down to the Bellagio and I happened across a scantily-clad young woman on the strip and we struck up a conversation about poker. I told her my bad beat story,“I had big chick dominating big lick on the op and even
intentionally ashed, what I thought I were, the nuts, but she was tied on so she back-doored me and sucked out on the river.”
When I asked her if she wanted to join me at the Bellagio for some more poker, I was arrested for solicitation.
Undercover vice cops should understand poker terms better. And so should players. It can help them improve their game.
hands. KQ is marriage or divorce, depending on whether it wins or not. JQ is called Oedipus. And forget subtlety, lowball players must not be very good spellers, because they call a 6 or a 6-high hand sex. Speaking of sex, get caught with belly strippers (use your imagination) by your ancée and you end up in the spare bedroom. Get caught with belly strippers (cards whose sides have been shaved so cheaters can recognize them by feel) by a game full of ru ans and you end in the hospital. My editor won’t even let me tell you why JKo is the bachelor hand.
Considering how many losing players there are, it surprises me how many terms there are for the best hand. On any given day, you might hear cinch, lock, brass Brazilians, Brazilians, Jerusalem and the Holy City. And there is also the nuts, mortal nuts, immortal nuts, immortals, stone cold nuts. Silliness aside, understanding poker terminology can help you grow as a player. For instance, if you don’t know the di erence between a rough 7 and a smooth 7, don’t play lowball.
If you think that becoming familiar with poker terms can’t help your game, let me tell you a little story. I was writing an 1800-word glossary for a poker website, and I was sur ng the web to gather information on the term e ective odds, I stumbled upon a post on one of the 2 + 2 forums where a player had written several detailed paragraphs, the most patient and eloquent explanation of the term that I could nd. e guy knew what he was talking about and I wondered if he had ever won any money playing poker.
I got down to the end of the post. It was written in 1999.
And the author had signed it... Greg Raymer.
Jim Mercurio is a lmmaker, writer and poker player. He recently produced the feature lm Hard Scrambled, which stars Kurtwood Smith (Robocop) and Richard Edson (Do the Right Thing). You can contact him at jim@.jamespmercurio.com
You probably think the only reason to study a poker glossary is to sound cool at your nickel-dime game. But I disagree. ere is a
fancy term in linguistics
loose), unless you know the term. How do you look for patterns for defensive bets, probe bets, feelers and continuation bets unless you know what they are? If you don’t
that you may have heard about in your high school anthropology class or Linguistics 101 called “ e Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”. It’s a simple theory that states that not only does the world a ect language, but language a ects a person’s perception of the world. If Eskimos understand two dozen words for snow, their experience of “when it snows” is di erent from mine.
e same thing applies to poker.
In a tournament, you can’t know if an opponent is tied-on, pot-stuck, pot- committed or pot-sucked (the pot is large enough that they will call no matter what) if you don’t know what those words mean.
“In a tournament, you can’t know if an opponent is tied-on, pot- stuck, pot-committed or pot-
understand these terms, do yourself a favor: don’t play tournaments. Everybody knows what dead money means.
As much domination goes on in seedy hotel rooms as card rooms in Vegas, but the kind that is important to a poker player is where a hand is a clear favorite over another one. Obviously AA dominates AK, but a situation that comes up more often is when AK dominates
AQ-A2. If you knew an opponent had AK, you have a better shot of winning with an 89 than with an AJ.
sucked (the pot is large enough that they will call no matter what) if you don’t know what those words mean. How do you look for patterns for defensive bets, probe bets, feelers and continuation bets unless you know what they are? If you
don’tunderstandtheseterms, do yourself a favor: don’t play tournaments.Everybodyknows
what dead money means.”
And you can’t be on the lookout for a player shifting gears (a switch in a player’s style from, say, tight to
ere seems to be something on the mind of the poker players who come up with nicknames for
Page 16 July 2005
Column: Wired Aces and River Rats with Jim Mercurio