pokermalaysia-blog

[pokermalaysia-blog]

Judi Online Malaysia

If you ask players on the tournament circuit who they think are the best poker players in the world, T. J. Cloutier’s name always conies up.

Not because he’s won the Big One: He hasn’t… yet, although he’s come mighty close to winning it several times.

And not because he’s made the most money at the World Series … he hasn’t, although he was the first player to make more than $1 million at it without winning the main event.

T. J. Cloutier’s name is always mentioned because he is the player that they all respect and fear.

T. J. is one of the last of the legendary road gamblers whose numbers are, unfortunately, dwindling each year. He brings a wealth of experience, card skill, and natural ability to every game that he plays.

But more importantly, he always brings along his knowledge of the thousands of players that he has faced head up in the 21 years that he has made his living as a professionalpoker player.

And that sixth sense about what makes his opponents tick … that innate ability to put a player on a hand … is why his opponents fear him.

It is as though he is looking at you through an invisible microscope, knowing what you are thinking, detecting you tells, delving into the inner spaces of your mind … you know that he knows you, knows what you’re going to do next.

And he’s going to use his encyclopedic memory of how you play to beat you.

I got to know T. J. first through hearsay, then by talking with him and Tom McEvoy while we were working on this book, and finally by observing him in action. All three encounters have been awesome.

While T. J. and I were recording his life’s story, I somehow had the feeling that I was sitting at the feet of a master … a master of people.

And I knew that there was much that I could learn from the man whom Mansour Matloubi has called “the greatest living no-limit holdem player in the world.”

Here is his story.

T. J. Cloutier graduated from Jefferson High School in Daly City, CA, where he was a three-letter man. At 6'3" tall, he was the center on the basketball team, played football, and still holds the home run record in baseball.

So, were all the girls waiting in line for a date with him?

Well… when I was a senior, I dated Pat Kennedy, who later won the Miss California title,“ he modestly admits. We had a study group of 10 or 15 kids that ran around together, and high school came very easy to me.

It was when I got into college that I found out that you had to study.” T. J. entered the University of California at Berkeley on a baseball and football athletic scholarship and played for Cal in the Rose Bowl in 1959 as a sophomore.

But when his mother became ill, he dropped out of college to go to work and help his father pay some of her medical bills.

Then the army snapped him up, since he no longer was a draft-deferred student.

T. J. gained his first experience playing poker when he was a caddy at the Lake Merced and San Francisco Country Clubs. When he and the other caddies came in from taking their loops (caddying), they played a form of poker in the caddy shack.

One day, somebody passed around some “lucky bucks” from Artichoke Joe’s, a cardroom in San Francisco. For $15, he received a $20 buy-in for the lowball game. So, at the age of 17 years, T. J. started playing poker in a public cardroom and by the time he was 19 years old, he was playing head-up draw poker against Artichoke Joe himself.

“When I began playing, all the games were no-limit, including no-limit lowball without the joker and no-limit high draw poker,” he reflects.

“Then when I entered college, I played poker at the Kappa Alpha house with Joe Capp, the Cal quarterback who later played in the NFL, and Bobby Gonzalez, who became a supervisor in San Francisco. I found out that I had a knack for the game, although I lost everything I had at the time. I was honing my skills at observation and getting to know people. I’ve always had a sort of photographic memory for how people play their hands in certain situations. If you and I had played poker together five years ago, I wouldn’t remember your name, but I would remember your face and how you played your hands in different situations, your tendencies. It’s a visual memory thing; I’ve always been very observant throughout my entire life,”

So, you keep a book on players, I asked?

“No, it’s nothing that formal. It’s more like pages opening in a book in my mind. And that helps … especially in no-limit games.”

He then went on to play poker in the army, where he furthered his training at cards. When T. J. got out of the army, he walked into the office of the Montreal Allouettes and asked if he could try out with them.

After checking out his record at Cal, the general manager told him, “We’ll put you up for two weeks, and then you can come out and show us what you have.”

He went to one workout and made the team, after not having played any football for two years. The team paid his expenses until the training camp began, and he played first string tight end for the Allouettes until he was traded to the Toronto Argonauts.

Canadian football was a lot different from American football in those days. Thirteen Americans were suited up, along with 17 Canadians.

“My value was that my father was born in Canada, so I could play as a Canadian — an American - trained Canadian was just what they were looking for,”

The team had only 12 players going each way, leaving just six reserves, including the kickers and other special players. So, in addition to playing first string tight end, T. J. also was first backup to the defensive ends.

“It’s a rugged brand of football, wide open. When I was playing, you couldn’t block for a pass receiver once he caught the ball past the line of scrimmage. The field was 110 yards long, the end zones were 20 yards deep, and the field was wider. You had to make a first down in the first two downs or else kick the ball, since there were only three downs. It was a real fast game, and everybody was in motion all the time.”

Another different facet was that you couldn’t block for a punt receiver; once he caught the ball, he was on his own.

“You had to give the punt receiver five yards to catch the ball. So, the other team would circle him like the Indians circling the settlers, and as soon as he caught that ball, he was dead, flatter than a pancake,”

T. J. played Canadian football for five years … until his knees gave out. Then he received a call from Victoria when they were trying to form the Continental Football League.

Victoria offered him its coaching job, but he also would have to play.

“Are you kidding?” he asked. “If I could still play, I’d be playing for Montreal or Toronto.

“Of course, football wasn’t the only game in town: A cardroom in Vancouver, B.C., spread a poker game called “sousem,” a form of five-card stud. In sousem, a four-card straight or a four-card flush beats one pair, so it puts a lot of action into the game,“ T. J. explained.

“It was quite a game, no-limit. The only other game we played was no-limit ace-to five lowball.” And even that game wasn’t the only one in town. In Montreal, the Hebrew Businessmen’s Club spread five card studs. I was getting whipped pretty good, but it was all a part of the learning process,“ T. J. admits.

When he left Canada, T. J., his father, and his brother-in-law started Bets Quality Foods, an acronym for Bill, Ed, and Tom (T. J.’s first name), and later brought T. J.’s brother in with them.

“We used the money that I had left from football and my dad’s retirement to start the business. Our slogan was ‘Your Best Bet in Quality Foods.’ We bought a huge freezer from Foster’s, a big cafeteria chain in San Francisco, when they went out of business and rebuilt it in our warehouse to handle our frozen food. We had a big egg business, too, although you don’t make much money from eggs. But when you’re serving big hotels, you have to give them the eggs at a good price to keep their other business. I was working 16 hours a day — I would take orders, load trucks, and pick up and deliver products. Later, we merged with A & A Foods, and they stole us blind. My dad won an 11 -count court case against them, but the owners left the country.”

After suffering this bad beat, T. J. began delivering bread for Toscana and eventually wound up as night manager for Wonder Bread in San Francisco.

“My first wife and I split up about that time, and I ended up heading for Texas with $100 in my pocket,” he remembers.

That was in 1976. “I went to work for six months as a derrick man on the oil rigs down there. On my off days, I was playing poker. Pretty soon, I was making more money at poker than I was on the rigs… and I’d been freezing up there, anyway… so that’s how I moved into playing poker full time.”

He played no-limit hold'em in Longview, Texas, and pot limit hold'em in Shreveport, Los Angeles, 51 miles away.

T. J. had only played hold'em a few times before that. While he was playing lowball at the Cameo Club in Palo Alto, CA, a club across the street tried three times to start a hold'em game, but the police came in and busted them every time.

Because of the good games in Shreveport, T. J. moved mere to play poker every day at the Turf Club.

“The games much smaller than we’re playing now. On Sundays, they would have a big game run by an old gambler named Harlan Dean who was well known in all the gambling places. He used to be George Barnes’ partner in the bridge tournaments in Vegas, and he was one of the original holdem players. I ended up selling the chips, and if I got broke or something, he’d call up on a Sunday and ask, ‘Well, we’re broke, are we, or partner?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, Mr. Dean, I know you’re not broke, but I am.’ Then he’d say, ‘Well, you come on by today and I’ll give you some chips.’ And if I got loser in the game, I could have the chip rack because he didn’t want the game to end. That’s when I started playing real serious poker.”

In 1978, T. J. made his first trip to the World Series of Poker, although he didn’t play in the championship tournament until 1983 (the year that Tom McEvoy won it).

But the third year that he played for the World Championship (in 1985), he finished second to Bill Smith, with Berry Johnston taking third.

“When it got down to three-handed, Berry Johnston had the best hand, an A-K. I had an A-J. The flop came K-J little and we got it all in. On the turn, I caught a jack and drew out on him to put him out of the tournament. Then it got to two-handed and I had the lead against Bill,”

“But the key hand of the whole match happened when I had two nines and he had two kings. He moved in and I called him with my nines. He won the pot and doubled up. Now he had a big lead, and I started chopping back at him,”

There were 140 players that year, so there was $ 1,400,000 in chips; I got back to $350,000.

Then Bill came in with a little raise, and I looked at an ace in my hand … didn’t even look at the other card, but made it look like I had.

I just went over the top of him with the whole $350,000. I knew that he had to decide… if he made the wrong one, I’d be back even with him again.

He had started drinking, and he gave away money when he was drinking. He called. When I looked back at my hand, my kicker was a three. And Bill had two threes. They held up and he won the title.

He was one of the greatest players of all time, Bill Smith was. Bill was the tightest player you’d ever played in your life when he was sober.

And when he was halfway drunk, he was the best player I’d ever played with. But when he got past that halfway mark, he was the worst player I’d ever played with.

And you could always tell when he was past the halfway point because he started calling the flop. Say a flop came 7-4-10 — he would say, ‘21!’ or some other remark like that.

When he got up to take a walk, he would have a little hop in his step, a ‘git up in his getting’ we used to call it. And then you knew he was gone.

But he had such great timing on his hands when he was younger and wasn’t drunk… he was out of this world. He knew when to lay down three of a kind, when to call with a baby under pair with two or three over cards on the board.

He was a fabulous player, but he became an alcoholic and that was that. You never worried about Bill when he was sober because you knew that he played A-B-C — tight — and you knew where he was all the time.

The only time that you worried about him was when he was about halfway drunk, and then he’d play all the way to ‘H’. He’d make some fabulous plays, plays you couldn’t believe.

Bill Smith was a truly great player.

In those days, T. J. was living in Shreveport, playing poker every day. “In fact,” he said, “I was having a gay old time. I was single then and would go to the Louisiana Downs 100 out of the 105 days of the meet, and then go out and play poker every night. I learned more about poker in Shreveport than anywhere else in the world.”

There was a real good game on Sunday and a guy named Jim “Little Red” Ashee used to P% in it. He’s bigger than I am — about 6'5” tall and 300 Pounds, but they called him Little Red because he started playing there when he was about 16 or 17 years old.

“I learned more from just watching him play than any other way. It was like sitting at the feet of the master, except that the master was not instructing T. J.”

“I was actually absorbing what Red did, and then suiting those moves to my own style, which was aggressive at times and passive at other times. You can’t let them pigeon hole you, you know.”

“A lot of people think that Sarge Ferris was the best five card stud player in the world … well, when Red was 17 years old, he was playing with Sarge, Corky McCorquodale, Homer Marcotte … all the big names in five-card stud used to play in Shreveport. And Little Red beat them all the time.”

Marcotte was killed in Dallas. “He was called 'The Louisiana Man’ because wherever he went, he would say, “I’m the Louisiana Man.” He was shot dead by some guy about 5'5” tall in a Dallas bar back around 1978 over a $50 bar bill.

The little guy kept dunning Marcotte for the $50 and Homer kept saying, 'Don’t you know me? I’m the Louisiana Man. You don’t dun me for $50.’

Finally, this little guy had heard enough, went out to his car to get his gun, came back in, and shot Marcotte.

Anyway, when Sarge went out to Vegas and won all that money, he put up a bankroll for Red while the World Series was on so that if Red came out, he’d have the money to play against anybody that wanted to play him.

The only person I know of that they ever got a game on with was George Huber, and he didn’t last two hours against Red. Lost about $40,000 to him.

Of course, Red didn’t come out very often because he hated to fly. You’d almost have to give him a shot like Mister T on the old A-Team show just to get him on an airplane.

Red liked horses and sports betting, so all his money went there, and after he got into that, poker wasn’t fast enough for him. But at one time, he was very well respected in poker, especially in the South.

A lot of good holdem players came from the South, from the Sun Belt states. T. J. is one of the best of them.

“While I was living in Shreveport, I found out about a real good game in Dallas that was run by a man that I will call The Big Texan. It was a $5-$10-$25 no-limit holdem game with either a $500 or a $ 1,000 buy in. I used to drive the 200 miles from Shreveport three days a week to play in that game.”

The first 12 times that he played in the game, he won. Then, on his next visit, the Big Texan told T. J., “I’m dropping the latch on you. If you don’t give me half your play, you can’t play here anymore,”

So, T. J. gave him half his action for his next 10 visits … and he won all 10 times.

“Then one day I went down there and out of the blue, the Big Texan said to me, 'I’m out today.’ That rang a warning bell in my head. I knew that there was something going on, something was wrong. There were two new players in the game, so I just bought in for $500 in chips, played for about an hour, and hardly ever got into a pot. Then I left.”

That was around the time that Bill Smith and T. J. became friends. Bill’s wife, Cleta, was working at Mitsubishi Aircraft in New Orleans and introduced T. J. to Joy, whom he married in 1984.

“That’s the reason I moved to Dallas from Shreveport, not just because of the game but because Joy lived there. She was the personal secretary to the president of Mitsubishi,”

Joy Cloutier has one daughter from a previous marriage, whom T. J. put through Texas A & M where she received her training as a petroleum engineer.

Today, Joy travels with T. J. to most of the tournaments on the circuit.

“Joy is amazing. I don’t know what she does while I’m playing the tournaments, but the day does not have enough hours for her,”

Lyle Berman was T. J.’s first tournament backer. At the time, Berman was backing Jack Keller and another player. When the second player fell out of their arrangement, Berman asked around to find out who else he might back.

T. J.’s name was suggested, so he and Lyle spoke on the telephone and then met at the airport on their way to the Bicycle Club’s big tournament in 1989.

“He’s a super guy. At the Bike, he asked how much I needed to play the side games during the three days that we were there. 'Well, I guess about $10,000 would be plenty,’ I said. 'I’m giving you $30,000,’ he answered,”

“He wanted me to have plenty of money to play with in those ring games, so I wouldn’t be playing scared money. I’ve been lucky for him in side games and in tournaments. We’ve made a lot of money together,”

T. J.’s play at the World Series of Poker is always open to Lyle as a backer.

Lyle doesn’t get to many tournaments anymore, but he always makes it to the WSOP. As high as you’ve ever heard of in a poker game, Lyle plays it. He plays in that high game at the WSOP with Doyle and Chip and the Greek and the others.

And when they play high, Lyle’s as good a player as anyone alive. He’s one of the two or three people that play in that game who can really afford it.

But that’s not it: He’s a great card player, a brilliant poker player. He has no fear whatsoever, no matter how much you bet at him.

In fact, in the final game that he and Bob Stupak played before the Stratosphere thing, Stupak brought it in for $25,000. They were playing no-limit deuce-to-seven with no cap. Usually, they played with a $75,000 cap, which means that you can’t lose more than $75,000 on one hand, but that night they were playing the game with no cap.

Lyle called the bet with 2-3-5-7, drawing at the deuce-to-seven wheel. He drew one card while Stupak stood pat.

When all the shouting was over, Stupak had bet $390,000 on his hand, an 8-5 pat, which is a great hand in deuce-to-seven. But Lyle caught a six and made a seven on Stupak to win the pot.

“From what I understand, Stupak still owes Lyle some of that money.”

T. J. has three World Series titles, along with a lot of place wins at the WSOP. In fact, he was the first man to earn $1 million at the Series without winning the big one. When I asked which year, he won the limit Omaha title, he said:

“I’d have to go look at my bracelet. I’ve won 43 titles and I can’t keep them all straight. The only major tournament where I haven’t won the big title so far is the World Series, but I came in second to Bill Smith and placed fifth to Chan the year that he beat Eric Seidel for the championship.”

In 1994, T. J. won two WSOP tournaments during its silver anniversary, one in pot-limit hold'em and the other in Omaha high-low split.

In no-limit hold'em, you’ll recognize the faces at the final table more than in any other tournament because it’s the Cadillac of poker. I won the last $5,000 tournament held at the Stardust, the Stairway to the Stars.

That was the year that I won the last Diamond Jim Brady tournament at the Bicycle Club, and I told them before it started, 'I won the last one at the Stairway to the Stars, I won the last one at the Union Plaza, I won the last one at the Frontier … this place might blow up next week if I win the big one here, too.’

I wound up winning the Bike’s Diamond Jim Brady tournament three years in a row.

That was sort of a peak for me that I don’t think can ever be repeated.

The first year that I won the Diamond Jim Brady, Mansour Matloubi and I started head-up play with about even chips. I had played with him for about five hours that day at the final table and he never ran a bluff on anybody one time, not once.

He wanted to get down to the final two. When we got head-up, he bet me $120,000 on the final hand, and I called him with third pair in a New York split second because I knew that I had the best hand.

I’d been chipping away at him so bad that he decided to try to run a big bluff on me. And that was the end of it.

Then when Tuna Lund and I got head-up the next year at the Diamond Jim Brady, Tuna had $360,000 and I had $120,000. I chipped away at him and chipped away at him and chipped away at him.

Finally, he made a $50,000 bet on the end on one hand and I called him with a pair of nines. He said, 'You got me.’ And I answered, 'Wait a minute … before you show your hand, I’ll bet you have a Q-10 off suit.’

He turned it over and sure enough, that’s what he had. That was the key hand.

The third year I won the Diamond Jim Brady, it got down to Bobby Hoff and me, so I played a formidable player every year. But in this one, I had three-to-one chips on Hoff, not like the second year that I played when I came into the second day of the tournament with the low chips.

The key hand that year was when I had two nines against Hal Kant’s two eights, which doubled me up from $9,000 to $18,000 and then I just went from there.

While T. J. is competing in a tournament, he often plays side games, too, although there are times when he doesn’t play any side action at all. He also occasionally plays in the satellites.

“At the Hall of Fame, I had a run one year when I played in six super satellites and got a seat in four of them, and I played in six one-table satellites and won four of those. So, I won close to $35,000 on the side in the satellites,”

He loves playing satellites for big events. One year, Berman told him to play in every $10,000 one-table satellite for the WSOP that he could enter, because at that time T. J.’s record was one win for every three satellites he played.

You get some pretty weak fields in satellites, although at the big one they’re not usually as weak as they are for some of the other tournaments. In a $10,000 satellite, you get $2,000 in chips so you can play the game.

But you have only $200 or $300 in chips in the super satellites, so everybody’s just moving in all the time and you’ll get drawn out on a lot. If you only have that many chips, all of them are in jeopardy the first round that you play.

Or you’ll try to draw out on somebody else, whereas you wouldn’t try to do that with a big stack.

One year, I played in a $10,000 satellite at the Golden Nugget and five people moved in all of their chips on the first hand.

So, one guy ended up with $ 10,000 in chips after the first hand.

Some people advise limit players to play the satellites if they want to learn to play no-limit or pot-limit hold'em. T. J. disagrees with that approach.

“I disagree with that idea 100 percent. I think that you must play in a live game to learn how to play those games because satellites are played so differently from a regular game. About the only thing you get a feel for from satellites is the raise in limits,”

The thing that has made T. J. so successful at no-limit and pot-limit holdem is his observation powers.

I know what Joe Blow is going to do in this situation and in that situation. That’s what helps me. When I’m in a tournament with all strangers, after 15 or 20 minutes I’m going to know how they play.

Say what you want, but there are people who have that ability, and there are people who don’t have it. You’re either born with it or you aren’t.

I have a knack for picking up people tells and all the little things that they do. Caro has a book on tells, but I have my own book.

What about the young new breed of “scientific” players, I wondered.

There are several good players among the young bucks. Phil Hellmuth is still young and he’s a great player. Howard Lederer is another one. There’s also a kid from Los Angeles named David Oppenheimer who’s a very good limit player. Huck Seed’s a great young player, too.

He took on the best and beat them. A lot of the old timers say, 'Well, they haven’t been breaking yet. Let’s see what kind of players they are when they get broke,’

You see, all the top players have had big money and have been broke and have come back and been broke and then come back again.

They’re the top players, and that’s the nature of the game. But when your factor in how much money you have to make to meet your nut, you have to be pretty successful to just stay alive every year.

So, are these new players playing something like “formula” poker?

The guys I’ve mentioned are all very good young players. But all the rest of the new players seem to be the same type — they’ve read some books, and they all play the same way.

I don’t think that’s good, because I like to see them when they have a few moves to them, a little creativity, some moxie. But you just don’t see that among them. The old-type players like Doyle and James “Goodie” Roy and Buck Buchanan (who’s dead now), and maybe even guys like me, are dying out.

Everybody today is book-learned, but in the old days it was experience-play, where you had to learn your players. I played with a kid down in L. A. who can’t win a hand unless money is given to him.

But I’ve never seen him lose because somebody will get in the game and just give his money to him.

Any top player would see that this kid doesn’t play a hand unless it’s a huge, huge hand, so why would you even get involved with this man?

Those types of players can’t beat me out of any money unless I do it to myself.

Are these new, young players making “formula” plays and relying on what they learn from books because they don’t have the training ground available to them that the “vintage” players, the road gamblers, had?

We used to 'fade the white line,’ the white line of the highway going from game to game.

You don’t have to do that anymore because of all the cardrooms and casinos. In California, the new players learn limit poker and most of them don’t have a chance in no-limit.

They learn to play hands in limit holdem like second pair and draws, and you can get eaten alive in no-limit with that kind of play.

Plus, they only have one move when they play no-limit: They’re afraid to play out a hand. So, when they play no-limit, they just put in their whole stack in situations where an experienced player might make just a decent little raise and get more money out of a person.

You see, the whole idea in poker is to maximize the money that you can get out of a hand. But these new guys are ramming and jamming when they get a big hand, playing limit style.

They’re so afraid of the draw outs that they’re used to getting in limit that they just put in all their chips and put somebody to the test on every hand… which is not the way to do it, because people just throw their hands away.

Say that you have $10,000 in front of you. You have two queens and some guy bet $10,000 before the flop. He might have aces or kings or A-K. You’re going to throw your queens away.

Why takes the chance?

Just throw the hand away and wait to pick up another hand. These types of inexperienced bettors aren’t going to get paid on their good hands.

These are the types of things that road gamblers have learned; they aren’t things that you pick up from reading books at home.

I can remember one time in the World Series when I had two kings twice during the first two hours of the $ 10,000 championship tournament. Both times, I made a little raise and was re-raised, and I threw the kings away before the flop.

And both times, I was right: Mike Allen showed me aces on both hands. I knew the player and so I knew the kings weren’t any good. It’s very hard to lay down two kings; it’s easier to play queens because you can get away from them easier than you can two kings.

But then, I remember a time when I blew it at the Hall of Fame. There was one guy at the table that I didn’t know. It was the first hand that was dealt, and I was in the big blind with the K-9 of diamonds in an unraised pot. The flop came 7- 2-3 of diamonds.

This guy led off and bet from the number one seat, the fellow on the button called, and I raised right there. The guy in the one-seat moved all in, and the man on the button (who had turned a set) called.

Ordinarily, I would have thrown away my hand. The only player that I didn’t know was the guy who moved all in … and he had the A-J of diamonds in his hand. So, I went broke on the hand and went out first in that tournament.

Do beats like that cause players to steam, I wondered.

No, I never steam. I might steam on the inside, but I never let other players see it. But I remember one time when Phil Hellmuth got knocked out of the Diamond Jim Brady tournament.

A velvet rope was connected to two poles at each door so that people couldn’t wander into the room. Phil went on a dead sprint and tried to leap over that rope, caught his foot on rt, and went tumbling out into the room.

Another time during a limit holdem tournament at the Diamond Jim Brady, the whole room was completely packed, and you know how much noise there is in a tournament room like that.

A Mulatto girl came into the room wearing a dress with cross hatches down the back of it cut all the way down, real low. She was an beautiful woman. She walked over to talk with Jerry Buss, and the whole room went silent, totally silent.

When she finished talking with Jerry, the entire room started clapping … in the middle of the tournament. In contrast, I was in a tournament at the Normandie one time when I saw an older lady pick up her hand to look at it up closely, had a heart attack, and keeled over dead.

The two tables around her caused some commotion, but the other tables didn’t even stop playing… nobody even noticed. But this girl stopped the whole room!

Do players prepare for tournaments?

When I’m taking my shower in the morning, I think about a few things, devise a plan. Then my wife, who’s with me most of the time, gives me a kiss and says, 'I love you and good luck.’ Then she says, 'Now, concentrate and don’t do anything foolish. Catch some cards.’ It’s the same thing each time.

T. J. also plays in tournaments other than no-limit and pot-limit holdem, including seven-card stud, Omaha, Omaha high-low split, and lowball.

I never used to play stud tournaments, because being from Texas and seeing what things can be done with a deck, I never liked a game where the same person always gets the first card like they do in stud. I’ve run into enough cheats and mechanics in my lifetime who could win every pot if the right guy was dealing.

And, of course, most of the players in a stud tournament play the game every day, so I wouldn’t play in one. But we were back in Foxwoods and Phil talked me into playing the $5,000 satellite for the seven-card stud tournament, and I won it.

Then I finished fourth in the tournament, and he said, 'Now you’ve got to play in all the stud tournaments.’ So, in the first 12 stud tournaments that I played, I won one, had two seconds, two thirds, and a fourth-place finish.

Today, he no longer feels unkindly toward stud.

You that there’s nothing going on in stud tournaments like there used to be in some of the ring games. Except for the year that Larry Flynt played in the tournament at Binion’s when he tried to buy off the table. He had a big bet with Doyle, something like $1 million-to-$ 10,000 that Larry couldn’t win the tournament.

When it got down to three or four tables, Larry tried to buy off some of the players and did buy off some of them by getting them to throw off their chips to him.

But Jack Binion had gotten wind of it and he had Dewey Tomko watching the table for him from the side. He saw what was going on, and Larry Flynt was never allowed to come back and play in the WSOP. Of course, none of this poker stuff was in the movie about Flynt.

I was curious about how T. J. opened his repertoire of poker games to include Omaha and Omaha high-low split.

The first time that I ever played limit Omaha, I won the WSOP title. I had never played limit Omaha, although I had played a lot of pot-limit. But tournaments are tournaments. You use the same process in every game; you work yourself up to the final table.

Final table play is the same, no matter what the game is. So, if you have a knack for playing the final table, you have a chance to win. I know a lot of players who can get to the last table, but very few of them know how to play it once they get there.

Of the tournaments that T. J. has played over the years, there have been only two or three times when he hasn’t placed in the top three in at least one of them.

Usually, he scores at least one victory in each tournament. The Place finishes that he makes “pays the freight,” takes care of his tournament expenses

Is it difficult to maintain a stable relationship when you Play poker professionally?

My poker playing is my job, and I separate it from my life outside the poker room. I cannot understand people who can play poker three or four days in a row and then can’t wait to get right back to it again … they don’t have any other life.

https://dewa52.blogspot.com/2019/07/judi-online-malaysia.html

I used to play steady in Dallas, five days a week, strictly no-limit hold'em against the best players in the world. Players used to come from Vegas and everywhere else to play in that game.

At least once a week, we had over $100,000 on the table. This game was played every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; there was another game that was played on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You could play at noon every day, and then again at 7:00 that night.

So, I would play until 5:00 each night, go see a movie, and then go play the evening game, unless the first game was so good that I didn’t want to leave it. I followed that schedule for years; and I never played on the weekends.

When poker is your profession, you treat it like a job. But for some players, poker not only is their vocation, it’s their avocation as well. You need some balance.

When they are at their home in Dallas, T. J. doesn’t like to go out in the evenings. He enjoys golfing at the country club and then meeting his wife for dinner after he leaves the greens.

She likes antiquing and taking care of their home.

“Joy is my support. She never sits right by me at a tournament; she sits in the background. She’s right there and she knows that I know she’s there. I look over and smile at her, or if I’ve lost a hand, I’ll make a little expression that she recognizes. She doesn’t know anything about poker, but she knows that if I move all of my chips in and then get the pot back, I’ve won; but if I don’t, I’ve lost.”

She does all the book work and takes care of the business end of things.

When he and Joy went on their honeymoon, they spent a few days in New Orleans. While Joy went antiquing, T. J. went to the track and won $5,000 on the horses.

From there, they traveled to Tampa where they went to the dog races and won another $3,800.

“After all our expenses were paid, we came home $5,000 ahead,” he laughed.

In what other profession in the world, I thought, can you go out for an evening’s dinner and entertainment, play some poker along the way, and come home with more money than you started with?

“Yes, but in what other profession can you work all day long and come home losing for the day?!”

Considering that he is one the most feared players on the tournament circuit today, T. J. comes across as being quite modest about his accomplishments.

“I wouldn’t say that I’m modest, but I’m not the type to go around saying, 'I’m the Louisiana Man.’ I feel in my own bones that I can play with anyone, and I don’t fear anybody alive.”

That feeling of confidence without the drawback of ego involvement may be the combination that gives T. J. his edge at the poker table.

Like so manypoker playersand tournament winners that I have interviewed, T. J. admits that he doesn’t have that same edge in every gambling game that he has played.

Even the best has a few leaks in their gaming activities.

I’ve had a lot of holes that I’m trying to patch up. I love craps and over the years, I’ve lost a lot of money at it. I used to love to run to the crap table all the time and, of course, that hurts your side play because it’s so much faster than the poker.

But now if I play craps, I never go to the table with more than $400, no ATM card, nothing like that. I’ve made several scores of over $50,000 off of $500, but if I go to the table with $20,000, I don’t win a single bet!

So now, playing craps is a once-in-awhile thing for me,“ It’s just another of the lessons that T. J. has learned throughout his career. The rest of them, he has down pat.