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Playing 4 Keeps™ Gaming Newsletter for Winners Celebrating Twelve Years! Gaming Workshops Since 1995
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™ A Gaming News Letter For Winners June 2007 Volume 9 Issue 6 Copyright © 2007 Michael Vernon
"Luck Has Nothing To Do With It When You Are Playing 4 Keeps!"
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The Long and Short Game of Poker and of Golf…. On The Coat Tales of a Gambler... Coming Events ***************************************************************
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I have written about the “personality” of a game be it blackjack or dice. During a game, several things come together contributing to a game’s “personality”. Some of these factors include the people playing the game, the people dealing the game, where the game is located, rhythm of the game, how the cards or dice are playing, just to name a few. I have trained myself to notice all that is going on in a game. Doing so provides subtle information important to how and if I will play.
A few months ago, I became aware of how playing in a Texas Hold’em tournament is somewhat like golf… not that I play golf any longer. But I am painfully aware of the long game and the short game and how each game is so different for the golfer. I believe I have discovered at least four parts to a Texas Hold’em tournament, the early round, the middle round and the late round and heads-up on the final table.
During the early round, I find myself settling in, getting a feel for the players and the “personality” of the game. Even with low blinds, I am not likely to play anything but starting hands in position. Ideally, I wait to play a “set-up”. A “set-up” would be the best possible hand, well disguised, against another player’s great second place hand. I let the second place caller build the pot for me and with the trap set, I then raise the bet at the appropriate time. Once pot committed, the second place hand will have a very difficult time folding their hand. Perhaps I call this the long game as it takes patience and time for the field of players to begin to narrow down. I may also have to wait a long time to catch the “set-up”.
In the middle round, I want to be in a position of having more chips than I started with. I am now thinking about the final table. The blinds will become larger and to weather through cold hands, I must have a cushion of chips to see me through any slump. I will play more aggressive, when I can, trying to close the win mid-hand. This move causes my opponents to fold sooner rather than later thus eliminates them from catching cards on the turn or river. I look at this stage, middle round like a squirrel gathering nuts for winter. I am not taking chances here.
In the late round, I prepare to play defense. As the field is whittled down, I am on alert for desperate moves from low chips players. I also want to have enough chips so as to not be pushed around by the chip leader. With the right cards and enough chips in front of me, I may want to do some pushing around myself. My game tightens on the final table. It is okay for others to lock horns and knock each other out. I know my time will come with the cards. I want to continue with an image of a tight player. This comes in handy late in the game as it allows me to semi-bluff or to play looser. If I succeed in gaining my opponent’s respect, I am likely to get away with a pot or tow. Again, this would have to be at the right time, in the right position, and then pulling it off with finesse.
I am not going to share all my card strategies, just to say that every tournament will have a different look and feel and it will have at least three different rounds of the game in order to survive to the final table. Heads-up would be the fourth and final round requiring yet a different approach to the game. This would depend on several factors, the amount of chips, the playing style of my opponent and the feeling that I have it going my way verses a dog fight for every hand. Next time you play a poker tournament, see if you do not experience the different rounds that I describe here. Certainly everyone plays their cards their own way, but it seems to me, everyone will have to experience these four rounds as they progress to the winner’s seat. I Won a Dance Contest…
I ran into Sailor during a weekend trip to Taos. A few days later after returning home, I received an email message from Sailor.
There is something to what you say, if you think you are going to win…you probably will. If you are afraid that you are going to lose, well that is even more likely to happen. It seems like no big deal when I think about it, how simple. I have to tell you about last night. I was in Albuquerque. I entered a Twist dance contest with a woman I had met there. I felt we were going to win. I said to her, “You and I are going to win this thing!” Turns out we did win first place. Maybe a little of it had to do with the fact that she was a “good looker”. However, there were several younger and much better looking couples than the two of us.
I have covered this topic of intention and winning before. What Sailor is experiencing is more than just “thinking”. In fact, the results tend to increase when thinking is not involved. It has to do with intention and ownership of the feelings that go with winning. It involves creative visualization seeing yourself at the finish line, with the results you desire. It is the ability to create a state of being and the feeling as if you have already won. It is expecting, anticipating and experiencing the reality, in your feelings, in your "etheric being", ahead of the time of the event.
It is especially powerful when you rehearse the exercise prior to a business deal. Seeing and feeling yourself in the meeting with the deal going your way. Like any skill it requires practice, discipline and consistent use for best results. Does it work all the time? No, but if you keep a record of the times you use it verses times you forget to use it, I am guessing that you will be amazed by your results. In fact, I shared this little secret weapon with The Dice Coach years ago, he still calls me with amazing stories of how he has used it received the positive results he experienced.
On The Coat Tales of a Gambler...
Sailor continues his story of Scarpone…Episode 17
It was late August. Scarpone had a brand new Lincoln and he had planned a road trip for us. We were on our way to cockfights near Memphis, Tennessee, just across the state line. Two other guys, Tim Gunns, “Gunner” and “Mike the Knife” were with us. Mike’s other nickname was Blade. His real last name was Knoff. Gunner was not into guns, but “Mike the Knife”, was never without a six inch Stiletto. It was a long road trip that would conclude with three days of poker and dice. A couple of days after the cockfights, we drove to Memphis to an out of the way beer joint. We took two rooms over the Branch Inn. The owner of the Branch Inn had the cops on the take and operated a small casino-like gambling hall in the basement. He had card tables, a dice game, a roulette wheel, and about a dozen or so nickel slot machines that never paid out. It was during that road trip, driving all night, that Scarpone shared his family story with me, while the other two guys slept in the back of the Lincoln. Here is that story, the way Scarpone told it to me. It’s more or less, how this gambling man, of Spanish descent, came to live in America.
Being Catholic, the Roybal family tree was recorded and handed down in the family’s bible. Don Miguel José Roybal, the Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather of Johnnie “Scarpone” Roybal, is where the known ancestral roots began. Perhaps it is also where Scarpone’s passion to gamble began. The story unfolds several years after the American Revolutionary War.
The American Colonists had won independence from England and the budding country was sprouting with the European gusto of “risking it all”. In the late 1700’s, an ambitious and daring Don Miguel operated a small fleet of merchant ships from the town of Cadiz, Spain. From Cadiz, his ships supplied goods inland to the flourishing city of Seville. Don Miguel had a partnership with a freight hauler who he trusted with any cargo. That was a good thing, as not all of Don Miguel’s freight was of a legitimate nature.
Cadiz was strategically located just across from Tangier, Morocco. Don Miguel’s ships traded with North Africa and other Mediterranean ports. With the English out of Spain’s way, Don Miguel was setting his sights on the New World. Additionally, Don Miguel was looking for a safe and timely exit from Cadiz.
You see, Don Miguel had his fingers in several different businesses, besides shipping. A lot of money passed through his hands. Some of the businesses were legal, some involved gambling and some were of a questionable nature. It was because of the gambling and questionable income that Don Miguel was making plans to sail away. His plan was to embezzle much of the money he owed to buy a new life in the Caribbean. Don Miguel planned to take part in the lucrative slave trade, joining up with other Spanish slave traders in Havana, Cuba.
The merchant, Don Miguel, traded spices, cloth, wine, olive oil, pottery, salted fish, dried fruit and other essentials. The larcenous Don Miguel was involved with the selling of women from Morocco into prostitution in Spain. Of course, associating with slave traders, there was opportunity for gambling and large sums of money. As the family story goes, Don Miguel got in over his head with his greed. He felt no need to honor debts to the otherwise low-lifer associates of his criminal business dealings.
Don Miguel was large in stature, ambition and ego. In so many ways, one could see how Scarpone was a chip off the old block. Ruthless to the end, Don Miguel did whatever was necessary to assure his hand in any profit. In its last years of tyranny, Don Miguel had to take every precaution to avoid the scrutiny of the Spanish Inquisition. However, he knew that his unscrupulous dealings were about to catch up with him. Purportedly it became the motivation for his leaving Spain with as much money as he could possibly take away. With his wife and then three children, Don Miguel José Roybal disappeared with four ships, and his equally ambitious crew, and sailed west for Havana.
After his arrival in Havana, one of Don Miguel’s smaller ships was re-fitted to transport slaves from Cuba to southern states in America. He sold the other three ships and, with the embezzled money, bought two much larger slave ships. The new ships were big enough to cross the Atlantic to Africa and sail back to Havana, filled with captured Africans bound for American plantations. (Sailor makes a side note, referencing the movie “Amistad” to help understand the Spanish slave trade with America.) Don Miguel soon became an extremely wealthy man and diversified his business with Cuban tobacco, sugar cane and rum. The huge Roybal plantation in Cuba carried on long after his death and the abolition of slavery in America.
The Roybals survived successfully and affluently for several generations in Cuba. However, after the turn of the twentieth century, discontent caused Scarpone’s Father, Fidel Juan José Roybal to leave Havana for Miami. He made the voyage just after the Mexican Revolution. Fidel was the youngest of six children. With four older brothers and one spoiled sister, he was all but left out from the family’s inheritance. Although he was treated well, and would never be short of money, his position in the family predicted that he’d never be in line for a fair portion of the family’s wealth. Seeing the writing on the wall, even though he was just a young boy at the time, Fidel made plans for his departure to America. Scarpone tells it that his father was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years of age, when he ran away from home and left Cuba for America.
Fidel had grown up well educated and well read. His infatuation with stories of Poncho Villa and the Mexican Revolution fueled his imagination for adventure in the wildness of Northern Mexico. He idolized the Mexican hero, Poncho Villa and the way Poncho sought equality for the poor of his country. It was his dream to go to Durango, Mexico and meet the famous General. It took Fidel longer than he planned to make the pilgrimage from Miami to Villa’s village in Durango. In 1923, Poncho Villa was gunned down in an ambush early one sunny morning. Fidel was still in Texas when he read the newspaper headlines proclaiming Villa’s death. As a student of Poncho Villa’s escapades, Fidel was strongly influenced by the revolutionary’s ruthless ways of “getting what you want, simply by just getting it”. Fidel made his way to Galveston Island. He worked there long enough on the docks to get his finances together and then he headed back to Miami to seek his fortune.
In Miami, Fidel met his wife, Camellia. She was fair skinned, with blazing red hair. Together, their fiery passions burned insatiably. Fidel José Roybal and Camellia Maria Aguilera had five children, three boys and two girls. Johnnie Roybal was the youngest of the three sons and he was Fidel’s favorite. Probably because of Fidel’s experience of being the youngest, he would insure that his youngest would not be disregarded. It was from his father’s worldly ways and special attention that Johnnie Roybal came to know about business, gambling, and money. He also learned the intricacies of the human nature of men and women, their tendencies to be lured by money and their weakness for greed.
Fidel and Camellia operated a bar and restaurant, Cantina Seville. From the outside, the cantina appeared as any typical “mom and pop” business in Cuban, Miami. Camellia prepared and served the food. The children grew up in the business and worked at different tasks, helping their parents. Under the watchful eye of his father, Johnnie Roybal came to know the workings of a business, above and below board. Fidel Roybal served illegal liquor, which he purchased from bootleggers in Georgia and Alabama. In the backroom, he ran seven-card, no limit poker, on three tables. In his pre-teenage years, Johnnie spent a lot of time hanging out in the back room, watching the games and fetching drinks, cigars and food for the gamblers. Some nights there would be more than fifty gamblers hanging out in the cantina’s back room, spreading money around. Scarpone told me that he amassed his first bankroll from the tips he earned working the back room.
Johnnie continued to work for his father until the war came along and he wanted to join up. His two older brothers had already enlisted, right after Pearl Harbor, and were somewhere fighting in the Pacific. In September of 1942, needing his father’s written permission because of his age, Johnnie joined the Marines at age sixteen. The Marines and the fortunes of war became Johnnie’s next teachers. It would prove to be his master’s training. The young boy was soon to become the streetwise, calculating gambler known simply as "Scarpone".
On The Coat Tales of a Gambler, to be continued… Copyright © 2007
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*************************************************************** Testimonials from P4K Seminar Participants
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Playing 4 Keeps™ enriches a player's experience to become a consistent winner. My commitment to you is empowerment. Learning to employ discipline creates confidence and strengthens intention through metaphysical lessons. I empower students by showing them how to avoid losing sessions. Most importantly I create metaphors that link the knowledge of casino games to winning ways in "the game of life". Michael Vernon
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