\nBy James McManus, Bloomberg View<\/p>\n
\tTexas Hold\u2019em tables often serve as less-genteel clubs for blue-chip businessmen. Instead of walking down fairways 30 yards apart from each other, or quietly hunting pheasant or muskie, poker buddies are elbow to elbow all night, competing and talking. The experience can tell them a lot about the other fellows\u2019 ability to make sound decisions under pressure. The quantitative and psychological acumen required by their day jobs also serve them well when a tight player check-raises them $2.50 or $25,000.<\/p>\n
\tBill Gates and Steve Ballmer aren\u2019t the only entrepreneurs to have honed their business-planning skills in dorm-room poker games. \u201cIn poker,\u201d Gates has written, \u201ca player collects different pieces of information \u2014 who\u2019s betting boldly, what cards are showing, what this guy\u2019s pattern of betting and bluffing is \u2014 and then crunches all that data together to devise a plan for his own hand. I got pretty good at this kind of information processing.\u201d While Gates seems to play mainly bridge now, David Einhorn, Alexandra Lebenthal, Bill Perkins, Farshad Fardad of GlobalWide Media and Michelle Smith of Source Financial Advisors are just a small sample of executives who play poker for fun and often for charity.<\/p>\n
\tCurt Kohlberg, the 56-year-old CEO of Kohlberg & Associates, is another one. He faces off about once a month with the toughest poker pros on the circuit, most of whom are less than half his age. Kohlberg has won $2,821,604, making him one of the most successful businessmen in tournament poker.<\/p>\n
\tHe doesn\u2019t need the money. His company, a consulting firm, has 200 clients with aggregate assets exceeding $3 trillion. \u201cI\u2019m a competition junkie,\u201d he tells me. \u201cGotta have that dopamine rush.\u201d (He\u2019s also a squash stud: He finished fourth in last year\u2019s U.S. Squash Masters the same month he made the final table the World Poker Tour Championship.)<\/p>\n
\tAlthough Kohlberg plays fewer events than his competition, he can afford top-notch coaches, who\u2019ve helped him compile hundreds of pages of hand histories into \u201ca database of patterns to identify strong and weak betting lines\u201d and determine \u201cunder which circumstances bluffing or value betting has a higher chance of success.\u201d He devours strategy books, subscribes to an online training site, and talks tactics with the likes of Jason Koon, Scott Seiver and Chris Moorman, young pros who play for nosebleed stakes.<\/p>\n
\tI asked him which talents transfer most readily from boardroom to felt. \u201cNegotiating business deals can be grueling,\u201d he said, \u201cbut you need the same concentration and stamina to go deep in a weeklong tournament. Sizing up opponents, being right far more often than not, adjusting tactics based on incomplete information to new players sitting across from you. At some point you have to go all-in with a hand or a bluff. Being wrong can be very expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tBiggest differences? \u201cIn business I want my `opponent,\u2019 the vendor, to make a fair profit. Once he\u2019s a client, the service K&A provides has to be ultra-high-quality, so I want my reputation to be `aggressive yet fair.\u2019 Whereas in poker my job is to take every last chip \u2014 snatch the babies\u2019 candy right out of their cherubic little mitts. Instead of earning their trust, I want them to fear me. A lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tHe went on: \u201cMost pros who don\u2019t know me peg me as Conservative Old Dude, but I usually start building my stack by targeting amateurs, and my cards then are often irrelevant.\u201d When he makes it to a final table he takes on the role of Psycho Ninja, donning \u201cgangsta\u201d attire and cracking weird jokes to keep other players off balance.<\/p>\n
\tHe wouldn\u2019t get that chance at the 2015 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure tournament, where I was also competing this month. I ran into him after he busted, and if he had a tail, it would\u2019ve been tucked between squash-toned legs. It took awhile, but I eventually dragged the sorry tale out of him. He had built a 30,000-chip starting stack up to 73,000 and was the chip leader at his table \u2014 until a Russian he\u2019d never played with was high-carded to his immediate left with a whopping 150,000.<\/p>\n
\tKohlberg, in his grief over what happened next, was impressively granular. \u201cThe blinds are 100\/200, 25 antes. A woman who\u2019s been playing straightforward raises to 500 with 45,000 behind. I flat-call with ace-king offsuit in the small blind. When the Russian tosses in a call, we\u2019re three-handed. The flop comes ace-10-6 with two diamonds, giving me top-pair\/top-kicker. I check, Russian guy checks, the woman bets half the pot; I call and the Russian squeezes.\u201d That is, he check-raises, trying to win the pot right away. \u201cThe woman folds and I call, thinking he\u2019s trying to bully me, the Old Dude, with his huge stack.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe next card dealt, he said, \u201cbrings the queen of diamonds, completing the straight and the flush\u201d \u2014 for anyone holding king-jack or two diamonds \u2014 \u201cso I check. The Russian insta-checks, which can mean weakness or strength.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe final card from the dealer was the 10 of spades. \u201cMy hand obviously now has only bluff-catching value, yet instead of checking with the intention of calling or folding \u2014 both of which are reasonable with stacks this deep \u2014 I somehow manage, with my degree from MIT and experience in 100 tournaments, to have a massive brain-cramp: I assume the Russian\u2019s range includes only bluffs and weak 10s, ignoring the 16 combinations of full houses he could easily have (with 6-6, ace-10, 10-10, queen-10) given his betting line.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe regret is etched in mauve below Kohlberg\u2019s brown eyes. \u201cSo, I feign weakness with a head fake and a frown, tank for awhile, deciding to bet with the intention of shoving all-in to a raise, as my stack is right for this play and it would look super-strong. He accommodates me with a raise, I shove, and he tanks for five minutes before calling with 6-6. While he was tanking I realized my insanely impatient mistake and went into prayer mode. And before you can say `Kohlberg\u2019s a moron,\u2019 I\u2019m taking the Walk of Shame, when I saw you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tHe groans. \u201cThe worst thing is, I made this totally unforced error on Day One of the first tournament of the year in which I was gonna raise my game to new levels.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tI do my best to commiserate, noting that all strong players make fatal misreads, but Kohlberg is having precisely none of it, as he heads to his hotel for a workout before catching a flight back to Boston.<\/p>\n
\tHe\u2019ll still be very good at his day job, though he\u2019ll have to wait until the next World Poker Tour event, at the Borgata, for his next surge of dopamine.<\/p>\n
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By James McManus, Bloomberg View Texas Hold\u2019em tables often serve as less-genteel clubs for blue-chip businessmen. Instead of walking down fairways 30 yards apart from each other, or quietly hunting pheasant or muskie, poker buddies are elbow to elbow all…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}