Live Play By: Mike Caro

Warning: This is not a good strategy to use online. This applies almost exclusively to live play...and when Mike Caro first wrote about this concept in Super System 1, that was well before online play.

So anyway... I decided I wanted to go play some cards tonight, so I headed out to the casino. Of course, I got out there shortly after Midnight on a Sunday night (technically, Monday morning), so it wasn't busy at all. There was only one table, and only 7 players at the table. I was the 8th.

So as soon as I sit down, I'm immediately assessing the best way to extract the most money out of the table.

I realize that there is one player with about $600 in his stack. The other 6 players all seem to be floating around $100. Everyone looks tired, and no one looks particularly happy. I figure this mostly likely means that big stack is playing rock and winning and not giving chips back, while everyone else is either stuck or even, no one can be up much at all with minimum buy-in being $100.

And everyone is playing tight and mostly seem to be trying to go for the big stack. There's hardly any action at the table. (Okay, stop right here. Everyone at the table is tight, but everyone is also short stacked--from here on out, that's important, because the following strategy isn't as optimal when there's plenty of decent sized stacks.)

So what do I do? I bring the action.

I'm not necessarily trying to lose chips out of my stack, but I'm playing almost as if I've got about 8-10 big blinds in a tournament and I need to double up or bust.

And why am I doing this? Well, if I double up, now I'm up. I can afford to play around kind of crazy like this, but with their chips, and can potentially win even more. If this happens, it's out of pure luck. The real plan is to give the short stacks at the table some chips to play with.

And I succeeded.

UTG player made it $10. I 3-bet it up to $30 with TT. Button player (who I'm extremely familiar with) made it $60. UTG player folds.

I know Button's range is AA, KK, AKs, no exceptions. Obviously with TT, I'm way behind. Normally, this is an easy fold without even thinking. But here's the logic...

Against AK, I'm a slight favorite, so would be the scenario where I potentially double up and play with their chips. But against AA or KK, I accomplish my other goal. I give action, and spread chips across the table in order to loosen the players up.

I push all-in, button calls, she has AA, I'm not surprised, she wins.

And Houston, we have action.

Now, instead of folding or raising, she's limping a lot, and even calling raises with a pretty wide range. Not only that, but my raises are starting to get called more even by the short stacks that didn't necessarily benefit from me "donking off" my initial $100 min-buy.

I basically intentionally dumped off $100 because I knew that I could beat the table, but in order to do that, I needed them actually playing hands, seeing flops, etc.

After I catalyzed the action, it was only a matter of me gearing out of pure crazy donk play and into LAG, and I just out-played the entire table for the rest of the session.

Unfortunately, once I started busting people, they stopped rebuying (1:30am on a Monday morning, obv), so the table just died out, but I ended up making $120 in the hour I played, whereas if I just sat and tried playing normal TAG without throwing some Crazy Mike Caro in there when I sat down, I would've maybe been lucky to make $20.