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Jeet Kune Poker

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 by Phil

To be a great poker player, you have to learn how to play against many different types of opponents. A player who tailors his game towards destroying weak opponents will have a hard time being successful if he is at a table full of players good players. Bruce Lee used to say that he didn’t believe in styles. “Water can flow or it can crash, be water my friend.”

It is important to mold your game so that it is suitable for the table you are sitting at. I often hear players like Phil Ivey who are about to begin a big tournament say that they don’t have any sort of plan on how to attack their table. It is best to take a few minutes to observe your table and gauge your opponents when you first sit down. This will allow you to avoid costly mistakes and capitalize on some of your opponent’s weaknesses.

There are some opponents who are willing to call off all of their chips with some very weak hands. It would be foolish to lose all of your chips trying to bluff someone like this just because you didn’t realize what type of player you were up against.

For those of you who aren’t familiar… Jeet Kune Do is the martial art started by Bruce Lee. This translates to “The way of the intercepting fist”. In other words, this means observing your opponent and coming up with an attack/defense that is tailored towards your opponent at that particular moment in time. Just as in no-limit poker, the proper reaction could be any one of a near infinite combinations of aggressiveness and passiveness.

Jeet Kune Do was Bruce Lee’s interpretation of a combination of several martial arts. Some of these martial arts were devious, some were considered passive and some of them were deadly. Bruce believed that it was necessary to train in all of these arts. Any poker player who wants to be successful should have the same sort of mind-set regarding poker.

Since the beginning of the internet poker era, experimenting with different playing styles has become very easy. As I was learning to play, I would decide that in some tournaments I would try to raise nearly every hand. On other occasions I would try to never raise at all. This was crucial in helping me realize how certain opponents would react to me, and what type of adjustments I would have to make as a consequence of that.

Several years and X dollars later, I began to be able to understand my opponents. I began to learn that poker was not so much a game of stealing and running over opponents, but more a game of dealing with people. In some cases you may have to take the aggressive route, but in other scenarios playing passively might yield better results.

Consider a scenario where you are trying to bluff an opponent. Perhaps he is expecting this because of your aggressive playing style. If you try and bluff him immediately, he is likely to call you because he will suspect you might be attempting to bluff him. However, if you display some passiveness early in the hand, when you try to bluff on the later streets, it is more likely to appear as though you have actually improved your hand. Sometimes limping in before the flop will have this kind of effect on your opponents. Your opponents will likely use the reasoning; “If he was trying to bluff, wouldn’t he have started the hand by raising?” By limping in, it will sometimes appear as though you are just trying to see more cards and improve your hand.

For more about this topic, check out my blog entry titled Switching Gears