DOYLEISM OF THE DAY: “Success is peace of mind in knowing you did your best.”

I’ve been getting lots of phone calls asking about my health.  I haven’t been anywhere for a while and its true I haven’t been feeling very good after extensive traveling and other recent events.  But, to my knowledge, there is nothing seriously wrong with me. My bride of 48 years has been having some health problems and I’ve been sticking close to home worrying about her. The only negative thing about my health is I finally have asked myself, “am I really this old?” Of course I know how many years I’ve got behind me but I guess I still think young and about the future. I guess that’s a good thing, anyway, thanks to everyone who called.

It’s been a while since I played any live poker. I play 5-10 NLH at DoylesRoom.com several times a day, but I can’t seem to focus enough for any long sessions. The NBC Heads Up Championship starts this Friday and I’m still debating if I want to play. Granted, I won’t be at my best, but I can put my game on auto-pilot and be competitive in that format. The antes and blinds have to go up very fast and that means whoever wins needs a lot of luck. If I decide not to play, there are lots of players waiting to take my place, but I’m pretty sure I will. It is a fun tournament with no long hours and it will be good to get out of the house. A friend in Texas asked me why he never sees my name on the leaderboard of any recent tournaments. I told him, “I don’t know, could it be because I haven’t played in any of them?”

I think the cash game players, including myself, owe the online pros an apology. I know there are lots of things about the mechanics of online play we don’t know and we shouldn’t criticize the pros that only play online. Maybe the hard truth is cash players are inferior to online players when at the computer and vice versa. I’ve decided there are 4 different kinds of poker players. (1) cash game (2) online (3) tournament (4) all around. Different skills are required for each group. There would probably be a different #1 in each, but if you listed the top 10 in each category, there would be more of the #4 group than any other. So my vote for the best players goes to the all around players. Could it be because I would probably be in that group (LOL)? The bottom line is it’s all poker and poker is the greatest game in the world.

Another question I’ve been pondering during my brief (I hope) exile from the poker scene is how do the old time poker players stack up against today’s best players? As there was no internet or tournaments long ago, you to have to eliminate the specialists in those fields. There wasn’t nearly as many games to choose from so take away the all around players and it leaves the cash game guys. The biggest difference is that the mentality of the two eras are so different. The oldtimers were playing for their living with little or no other income. Many, many times they had their entire net worth in front of them. That makes it a lot harder to make these big bets when you didn’t have much money and didn’t know where you could get any more. These guys were true gamblers. Compare that to today’s great players who have lots of income from today’s poker world. Good luck to the guy that 4 or 5 bet any of the oldtimers trying to make a play on them.

So, for that reason it is almost impossible to make valid comparisons about today and yesteryear. Most of today’s players have good management skills but don’t have the pure gambling mindset of the old guys. There are exceptions. Phil Ivey, Tom Dwan and David Benyamine are some names I think are “throwbacks” to the old time pure gamblers. I think any one of the three would fit right in with the great players of the past.

It makes me think of a Stu Ungar story. Someone brought up the question, “What if there was only one bullet in a six shot revolver, would you spin it and put the gun to your and pull the trigger for 20 million dollars? Everybody agreed that nobody would do that. Stu said, “for 20 million, they could put 5 bullets in the gun and I would do it.” Everyone laughed but I’m not sure Stu was joking.

DoylesRoom has an unusual promotion with our bounty tournament every Wednesday. We have 3 or more bounties each one worth $1,000. Knock out 2, win $10,000, knock out 3, win $50,000. Last week, a player broke 2 bounties and won 10k!  Not bad for a $25 buy-in tournament and if it is your 1st time on DoylesRoom.com, you get the $25 back, I don’t know who comes up with those things.

I hope everyone was as proud of our mayor, Oscar Goodman, as I was. President Obama made a second disparaging remark about Las Vegas in a speech and Oscar refused to meet him on a recent visit to Vegas, unless he apologized. The president didn’t apologize and Oscar was very visible by his absence during our president’s stay. Way to go Oscar!

-DB

DOYLEISM OF THE DAY: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

I’ve never sat around the house doing nothing constructive. Since the 1st of the year, I sit at my desk all day with no plans for travel or even looking for cash games. I work on projects that I’ve been postponing for years, play online at DoylesRoom.com, read, watch TV and DVD’s. I read blogs, go to twitter several times a day, and spend a lot of time reflecting on past and future events. It is a pretty boring life but you do pick up new insights about lots of things.

For example, I guess I never really understood that people regard me as one of the ancient and old-time players. Really!  I don’t do a lot of time studying spreadsheets and trying to figure out my opponents patterns, etc. That stuff may work online against players you are unfamiliar with but I still believe poker is a “people game”. If you can look a player in the eye, you can learn more in a fraction of a second than a month’s worth of analyzing his play on paper. I’m not saying the paperwork has no value, but for Pete’s sake, don’t these genius youngsters understand the changing gears concept of poker? I may have certain trends in my play that can be monitored but I challenge anyone to figure out what I’m going to do in a poker game. How can they when I don’t know myself what I’m going to do until I do it? I’m always aware of certain things I do while playing a pot and I try to vary different things. That is an “old fashioned” thing called tells.

Speaking of tells, all the top poker players develop what we call mini-tells on every player we play with. How? By the way a newcomer handles his chips, his table talk, plus physical tells that almost everyone has. The older pros are aware of this and try to change several times in each session how they bet, etc. Even the great players sometimes are unaware of some things. For example, Stu Ungar did something that was 100% accurate. When we were playing lowball draw, it is common to pretend to look and then bet out. Stu would sometimes look at his card and bluff knowing for sure what he had. He would always make a point of being sure I saw him looking back so it would eliminate my thinking it was a “dark semi bluff”. That was golden and over the years I’ve picked up things like that on almost all the players I’ve played with. The tells have to be in the right situation always, but my point is, how do you learn things like that online?

I feel I’m rambling quite a bit now but when you are doing nothing day after day, your mind gets active. Anyway, I’ve never pretended to be a bonafide online poker player so I might not know or understand some of the more complex problems. When I hear people talking about tracking devices, statkeeping software, etc. I just think WTF. So maybe it is a different world when you play online and perhaps I’m a dinosaur and don’t understand the ins and outs.  But poker to me is a group of players sitting down and trying to figure out how to get the opponent’s chips.

I might as well keep rambling while I’m at it. After I read blogs, forums and different poker discussions, I see where I’m perceived to be a “nit” at the poker table now. Old style, new style, doesn’t make any difference. The object of the game is to win your opponent’s chips. It’s not to make “star” plays and try to entertain an audience. I thought I was doing ok when I won 15 straight times in the TV cash games. But that doesn’t please the poker critics who want to watch spectacular plays, big pots, etc. If you want to watch poker on TV objectively, you have to realize that the way the other players play dictate the way you should play. So yes, I sit back and wait for the young guys to make mistakes. And they always do. Call me crazy, but I only see 5 or 6 players that I can think are fundamentally sound. You can get away with it sometimes but if you don’t observe some simple fundamentals, they are going to bite you in the ass. There must really be a big difference in the online play because most of the youngsters from the internet don’t have a clue. One of these days I might just twist off and show these kids how Doyle Brunson used to play. Actually, that would be stupid because right now, it’s hard to lose when these young guys are trying to make their star plays.

Being an ex-basketball player, I think a good analogy is basketball at every level. Today against yesterday. The players are certainly different, but in a physical sense. Today’s players are bigger, stronger and can do things no player in my era could do. But the object of the game is the same. You try to score and keep the other team from scoring. Bottom line, you try to win. Poker isn’t a physical thing and the main thing is to win more chips than you lose. So it’s pretty difficult for me to say today’s players are better than the old-time players. You can only judge the quality by who wins and who has the staying power. Lots of room for debate here.

-DB

DOYLISM OF THE DAY: “Life involves risk. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.”

I’m sitting at my desk at 8:30 at night wondering if I should go to bed, watch a movie and go to sleep.

Good Googa Mooga! What in the world has happened?  Poker games are getting to be scarce in Vegas and all the players are going to tournaments in other cities and even other countries. It’s my opinion that these tournaments may be the end of the high and medium stake poker games. Back in the 80’s, 90’s and the early years of 2000, there were games everywhere. If there wasn’t a game going, Chip Reese, Pug Pearson and myself would sit down and start games that would fill up and run for days. Now between tournaments and the internet, you could shoot a cannon through the high limit sections of Vegas cardrooms and not hit anyone.

Thank goodness for NFL football and the college bowl games. With no poker games going, they fill the time in nicely. I always bet the underdogs in the college bowls and I had a banner year as the underdogs won by a 3-1 margin. The NFL is a little trickier and you have to be lucky to pick the winners.

The Brunson family has a tradition of making Kentucky Colonel Bourbon candy for the holidays. We haven’t done it for a couple of years, so our family, Todd and his wife Anjela and my daughter Pam joined Louise and I to start making the candy again. We made the best tasting candy you ever ate. It was so good I made another batch the next day that was even better. Maybe I’ll join the Food Network on TV.

I took some of my candy down to my doctor and he showed me the results of my last checkup. I’m one lucky guy! All my blood levels were in the normal range and on an echocardiogram they made, everything about my heart was perfect. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve always felt that  a poker player’s heart pumps so hard it keeps your arteries clean. After all the chit I’ve been through, mine are completely clear. You probably shouldn’t quote me on that . On the flip side of that, seems like we are losing a lot of poker players in the past few years. We lost Amir Vahedi a few days ago with complications from his diabetes. Amir was in the Iranian army before coming to America and becoming one of the more popular poker players. Amir represented DoylesRoom.com for a year and always did anything that was asked of him. He did everything with an infectious laugh that made everybody love him. I hope they put a box of his trademark cigars in his coffin because I know how much he liked them. RIP my friend.

-DB

DOYLISM OF THE DAY: “Talk is cheap because the supply exceeds the demand.”

I’m always glad to see Christmas come and then glad to see it leave. It is a time for family holidays. Our family does an overkill on the gift giving. Our Christmas tree is overloaded with presents and even overflows our living room.  Actually, we have just about everything we want, so I don’t know where or why we give so much. The Christmas dinner is always a treat!

I need a break from poker. I’ve been on a terrible losing streak. I broke my own rule. I’ve always said if you lose four or five times in a row, you should always take a break. But, the games look good and I couldn’t stop, and I’ve paid the price by losing seven out of the last eight plays. I won’t get close to another poker table until 2010.

If anyone is a Nostradamus fan, the History Channel has a program on DVD called, The New Book of Nostradamus. It seems a book that nobody knew existed was found containing more of his predictions.

The Vatican in Rome supposedly had the book in a secret vault because Nostradamus predicted the fall of the Catholic Church. Previously in his Quatrains, Nostradamus predicted things like Napoleon, Hitler, 9-11, the death of the Kennedy brothers and many more events that took place after his death in the late 1500’s. It’s really scary when in both his Quatrains and the recently found new book, he predicts the earth will end in 2012. Something to do with the alignment of the planets and today’s astronomers agree there is reason to be concerned. Oh well, nothing we can do about it.

As the year winds down, I can’t help reflecting on the past. The thing that bothers me the most is the foolish things I did when I was young and the fact I can’t go back and do them again. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good, and when it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

-DB

DOYLISM OF THE DAY: “May the work that you have be the play that you love.”

There is finally some poker action in Bobby’s Room at the Bellagio.  We have lowered the stakes and more players are coming in. It’s really dumb to play so high no one except the ultra rich guys can play. I was completely exhausted when I got through traveling but after playing poker for 4 straight days, I feel great again. It is really amazing how playing helps me. I guess I’m a junkie after all these years.

DoylesRoom.com is putting on a “Twitter Followers Freeroll”  because I’ve got over 100,000 followers on Twitter. The winner gets a weekend in Vegas, dinner with me and partying with the young DoylesRoom pros. I guess they decided I couldn’t handle the partying and they may be right. The tournament is on this Sunday at 6pm Eastern time. I’ll tweet the password at 4pm Eastern the same day because our tournaments hold a few thousand players at a time. You have to have an account at DoylesRoom along with the password to play.

Cardoza publishing has already ordered the second printing of my autobiography because of the unexpected number of advance sells. It is going to hit the bookstores Nov. 10th and I’ve still got mixed feelings about writing this book.

I appreciate all the tweets, emails and phone calls expressing concerns over my toy poodle Casper. Casper jumped off a desk and knocked both his hips out of socket and Louise has to carry him everywhere because he can’t walk.  I should say couldn’t walk because he is able to walk on level ground now, he just can’t jump or put any weight on his back legs. Casper is tough and I expect him to last a lot longer as he is only 13 years old.

I’m back in retirement on pro football. I bet on Minn +6 points when Pitt made 2 defensive touchdowns in the last 5 minutes to beat me. I had Miami +6 against N.O. Saints and was ahead 24-3 at the half and lost. Then, I had Houston -3 and was ahead 21-0 at the half and managed to tie that one 24-21. I’m sure I’m going to get lots of sympathy, all poker players are unlucky when betting on sports.

-DB

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