Poker

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FRANK SWERTLOW

Staff Reporter

Bearded, balding and a study in beige, Mike Caro doesn’t mince words when he talks about the art of playing poker and of winning.

“Your grandmother lied when she said you can’t make money gambling,” Caro declares to a class of hungry players taking his seminar on poker at Hollywood Park Casino. “Who do you think makes money?”

“Casinos!” the class shouts back.

Most of the time, yes. Caro, casually dressed in a plaid sport jacket and tan slacks, cautions the group mostly men to stay away from the craps table. Forget about roulette, bingo, keno and lotteries. Don’t even think about the slot machines. In those games, there is no rational reason to favor one decision over another, and the house ultimately wins.

But then there’s poker.

Poker players can learn to win the raison d’ & #281;tre for the Mike Caro University of Poker, Gaming and Life Strategy at the casino.

Three times a year, Caro, the so-called “Mad Genius of Poker,” teaches an eight-week class, “The Introduction to Poker Playing,” at Hollywood Park.

Students, usually numbering around 350, learn strategy, reading their opponents’ body language for clues about their hands (called “tells”), and how to survive and win against seasoned players in games like Seven-Card Stud and Hold ’em.

“He teaches you to throw out luck, intuition and your feelings,” says Charlotte Parker, a recent graduate. “You learn the rules of how to win and lose like an opponent to your left always has the advantage: the last card.”

Every Tuesday night, Caro offers a free seminar for advanced players, usually about three dozen, who want to hone their skills. “You get feedback,” said John Tate, a self-described intermediate player. “You can read a lot of books, but it is all theory. If you want to drive a car, you have to get behind the wheel.”

Experts and other professionals agree that Caro is not only one of the best poker players in the world, but also one of the best teachers. He is regarded the best draw poker player in the game.

Not surprisingly, Caro’s life revolves around poker, and it has become a cottage industry for him. His wife, Phyllis, is the head of poker operations at Hollywood Park. Caro himself has written eight books about poker, including one on “tells.” He also has three videos and writes numerous magazine articles on the subject, including a column for Card Player magazine.

Though Caro charges little or nothing for his classes, he’s a paid consultant for Hollywood Park on marketing, gaming, publicity and statistics. The classes fall under that rubric.

Caro also developed a service that monitors card cheats and scams, and won’t teach advanced students unless they pledge to abide by specific ethical standards. And he’s developing computer programs on poker. His first was called ORAC (Caro spelled backwards).

“He gives very accurate information about gaming,” says Tom W. Bowling Jr., vice president and general manager of Hollywood Park Casino. “There are a lot of books out there offering systems that don’t work. Some are outright deceptive and some are good only for the short term. Mike is honest. He believes in the integrity of the game.”

One of the keys to Caro’s strategy is learning to read tells, subconscious signals from an opponent tipping off his hand. They can be facial tics, the glance of an eye, or a jittering hand. Reading these tells is an art form, and can mean the difference between winning thousands of dollars and being in the hole.

“In the beginning, everything is even money,” Caro says. “Everything is a coin flip, 50-50. But the more you know and the more you see gives you an edge. Reading a tell gives you a huge edge.”

One important tell is an opponent who sighs. To the uninformed, it could mean a bad hand, but to Caro, it’s a bluff that tries to mask a strong hand by suggesting a lousy hand.

Another tell is someone staring intently at his cards, squeezing them with his fingers. It’s a tip that the player has a poor hand and is desperate. If an opponent holds his breath before a big bet, Caro warns, it’s a tell, too a bluff.

The eyes, however, offer the biggest tell for an experienced player. A glance away from the table signals a strong hand, a reflex action players use to try to downplay their own excitement.

When Caro plays in a high-stakes game with other professionals, he will often cover his entire face with his hands, opening his fingers so that he can see out but his opponents can’t see in. It is a bizarre sight, but it may be part of the reason he’s called the “Mad Genius of Poker.”

Indeed, Caro admits to playing up the weirdness factor to pressure opponents into making tells. That, he feels, increases his odds. He’s been known to fluff up the hair on the sides of his head, making him look like an & #233;migr & #233; from a madhouse.

“I am manipulating them,” he says.

When most people start out, they lose a lot of games until they learn overall strategy. That can be costly and discouraging.

“So many people want to play, but they don’t want to risk looking foolish,” Bowling said. “Mike helps them through this negative period without playing for money.”

At Hollywood Park, pots for the lowest-end games usually total $20 to $40. At the high end of the game, a pot can total $50,000 and that’s no place for an amateur.

Caro estimates that there are 250 people in Los Angeles who earn $25,000 or more playing poker. Often, they have no other job. Top players average six-figure incomes. Some may earn as much as $1 million in one year, but no one consistently earns seven figures year after year.

Caro was born in Joplin, Mo. and grew up in the Denver area. In high school, this self-described “free spirit” began playing poker with one of teachers. Graduating high school, he took a job with the Colorado highway department, but quit to become sports editor of the Grand Island Independent in Nebraska.

He and his wife moved to the Los Angeles area, where he began playing poker professionally in Gardena. It was there that he began developing a reputation, especially at draw poker. In 1984, he became the chief strategist at the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens, and two years later, general manager of the Huntington Park Casino.

Doyle Brunson, a two-time world poker champion, asked Caro to write a chapter on draw poker in his book, “Super System” and later one on statistics. The book marked the beginning of Caro’s career as a poker-playing writer.

So how good is Caro? While strolling through the vast Hollywood Park casino one night last week, top poker players shouted out to him: “Hey genius, play at our table!”

Even at 10 p.m. in a casino filled with more than 1,500 gamblers, the wild-eyed Caro is a superstar. Everybody knows him. Even with just a sports jacket, he is better dressed than most casino-goers, who are in polo shirts, T-shirts, sweatshirts and denim. This is not, after all, Monte Carlo.

When he’s in a game himself, Caro is likeable, friendly and animated, playing with lightning speed, never hesitating on a bet. Like many pros, he likes to play with cash instead of chips it throws his opponents off.

In a one-on-one game of Hold ’em against Craig “Rambo” Manoogian, Caro takes out a couple of $5,000 bundles of new $100 bills and places them next to a stack of chips.

“He’s one of the toughest players around,” Caro says about his muscular opponent. But this night, things didn’t go Caro’s way; after hours of playing, he lost $9,000. Earlier that same week, though, he had been cleaning the tables for four out of five nights, winning a total of $12,000.

When pressed, top players acknowledge that Caro is as good as he claims to be.

“He may act like a crazy genius, but he has spent over 10,000 hours analyzing every aspect of the game,” said Steve Margulies, one of the country’s top players. “He’s done computer programs on poker. He knows all the numbers, and that is available to him when he sits down at the table.”

No one would offer a clue on how to read the Mad Genius. The unwritten rule, they say, is silence. So how did Mike Caro earn his nickname?

“You have to realize that you are not talking to a normal person,” Caro says.

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