Player's Stories

Don't Try to Bluff Foreigners
By Vince Burgio

In case anyone thinks I'm going to pull a John Rocker and follow my title by saying something bad about foreigners--wrong. I am actually going to be complimentary.

Several years ago when almost all the legal cardroom action was in Gardena, California and Lowball or Ace to Five was "the game", I became very interested in trying to discover why certain players were better at reading their opponents than other players.

Lowball has always been a game that requires more reading ability than any other poker game other than No Limit Holdem. It really is pretty simple why that is so. Other games are usually played with more participants in every hand, and more betting rounds, which means bigger pots with much better pot odds. This, plainly put, makes calls more automatic and diminishes the importance of reading a player. Let's face it, if you're getting forty-to-one pot odds, you don't have much of a decision as to whether or not someone is bluffing.

In Lowball once you have a good grasp of hand selection, the hardest and most important decision you will have to make, over and over, is whether or not you can bluff a certain person or on the other hand, whether or not your opponent is trying to bluff you.

This leads me back to my original question which was, "Who are the players with the best reading skills?" and more importantly, "Why are they better than others?"

I began to observe early on that many of the good reading, intuitive players were foreign-born. This then begged the question, "What would give these foreign-born players this special ability?" I thought about it and finally came up with what I thought was the explanation.

I reasoned that the people who come to this country not knowing our language are constantly forced to pay much closer attention. Every conversation when you're first learning a language is very tough. You have to guess many times as to what someone might be saying and therein lies the answer: One has to become much better at understanding body language.

I remembered back to my childhood and thought maybe I could identify with people who come to this country who do not understand the language. I remember we would go visit my mother's parents, who were both Italian immigrants. They spoke almost no English. My sisters and I spoke no Italian. You had to pay very close attention to every little gesture, movement, inflection and so on to try and understand what they were conversing about.

Many years later when I moved to California and opened my construction company, I had a large number of Mexicans employees working for me. They were great workers but the problem was many of them spoke almost no English. I spoke no Spanish, so again in order to get along better with my men and try to communicate with them, I had to try to learn to speak Spanish. After many years I became fairly proficient in Spanish, but I still had to watch and listen much more carefully than when conversing in my native English.

Maybe it is wishful thinking but perhaps the many hours of having to watch a person very closely when communicating with them over the years, is the reason that I might have a little better than average reading skills.

The more I examined my theory, the more it made perfect sense. In a way it's like people who are deprived of one sense compensating by refining their other senses. Or more precisely put, people who lose their hearing, see better--people who lose their sight, hear better.

Many years later, when I entered the world of No-Limit holdem, I immediately saw the immense value in reading other players. I wondered if my theory would still hold water. I asked myself the same question that I had asked myself twenty years before. "Who are the best players for reading skills, and why?"

It shouldn't have surprised me when I saw a large portion of the people that were successful, and had what I considered very good reading skills, were foreign-born.

Let's hope you think a little of what I've said makes sense. If you think it makes a lot of sense, maybe you should go to a foreign country where they speak a different language, and spend some time there. When you come back, I think you may find that your Lowball or No Limit game has improved dramatically.

For What it's Worth