When Benny Binion, the late owner and founder of Binion's Horseshoe in downtown Las Vegas, was in a talkative mood it was hard to shut him up.
Not that anyone would have wanted to do that. Binion was one of the most charming people I have ever meant. He had a good sense of humor, he was blunt-spoken and he knew the gambling business better than anyone I ever met.
We were seated in one of his coffee shops on a Saturday afternoon and I asked him to tell me how to be a better poker player.
Benny set down his cup of coffee and said, 'As far as I can determine, you're doing pretty well."
I finished my cup and signaled for a refill. "I can always do better. I've had my bad days and I'd like to eliminate them."
Benny nodded. "I can relate to that. Let me go over a few things that might make your poker game more profitable. I know a lot of players who can play their good hands pretty well, but they still end up losing."
"Why is that"
"They play too many hands. If you start out with two many hands, it's almost impossible to make up those lost chips. You'd have to get damn lucky on the draw and that just ain't gonna happen very often."
I thought about Benny's words recently -- my old pal has been dead a number of years -- and concluded he was right.
Poker players who lose consistently do play far too many hands. They crave action and it costs money to get involved in that action.
I had a habit a while back of keeping track of the hands I passed and the ones I played. My simple method was to make a check-mark for every hand dealt to me. When I received a playable hand, i would give it a special marking on a card or sheet of paper to keep track of the hands I actually played.
My own statistics recorded that I played about one hand out of every 20.
Recently I have been on a bit of a losing streak and I started keeping track of the percentage of hands I was playng. Sure enough, I found that I had been playing about one hand out of every eight or 10, far too many to overcome the bad cards I was being dealt.
Benny also stressed position as a vital strategy of good poker. When you are in position as I have written before on this website, You can play almost any two cards profitably. On countless occasions, I skipped playing a hand when I was in position and wound up getting cards that would have won for me.
That made me believe that the gods of chance was having fun at my expense.
A good example is the small blind. In an un-raised pot, it generally pays to add that small amount to complete the bet. You should hardly ever fail to complete the small blind in a hand in an unraised pot. That's also a good reason to take a seat to the right of a passive player. Your chances of being raised are much smaller.
Benny also believed in using a pure bluff on occasion just to throw off the 'expert' players.
This meant bluffing on any two cards, sometimes without looking at the hand, and then betting to the river without checking your hand.
Benny said such a play should not be made often. Even if you got called and turned over a losing bluff hand, that would not be especially damaging since it would certainly cause the other players to call you on future bets when you were not bluffing.
This strategy fits in with a recent column on 'Changing Gears' that I wrote about Doyle Brunson. It's always good to keep the other players off balance and this is a good way to do it.
When I go back to my next casino, I plan to return to my hand-counting strategy. Hopefully it will let me get back on my winning streak. I will play the button aggressively and sneakily as Benny suggested and see if that helps. Wish me luck.
Author: Geno Lawrenzi Jr.
(Geno Lawrenzi Jr. is an international journalist, magazine author and ghostwriter and poker player who lives in Phoenx, AZ. He has published 2,000 articles in 50 magazines and 125 newspapers. If you want to share a gambling story or book idea with him, send an email to glawrenzi@gmail.com ).
