It Took Eight Months for Phil Gordon to Say Something Useful

Someone bought me as a well-intentioned gift, Phil Gordon's day-by-day page poker calendar, called Poker: The Real Deal. I always feel bad not using calendars people give me, so I have dutifully used it throughout the year. Each day, it gives a pithy comment to “help improve your poker game”. It had yet to say anything that good; most of the advice was simplistic things about limit poker that anyone who has read a poker book once knows.

But, yesterday, it gave a piece of advice that I often see experienced players forgetting over and over:

A good poker player can beat just about any low-limit game. If you are not consistently beating the madmen and morons at the $3/$6 table, you probably are not going to be able to succeed at the middle limits.

I have so often heard “good” players say they can't handle $2/$4 anymore or the people play so bad I can't beat them. I do agree that beating players that bad is as boring as your worst high school teacher's lecture, and that sometimes those low limit games make it really difficult to beat the rake. Other than that, though, this advice is spot on and everyone should take it to heart.

I sometimes use low limit games to challenge new parts about my game; Negreanu and Ivey both suggest playing below your stakes and trying to win “every hand” as an exercise in reading people well. (Negreanu claims that you're doing well if you try this and stay even over a long session.) But, the important thing is: no matter how far you are along in your poker development, you should be able to sit down in any small stakes game and be able to beat it.

Hey, I Stacked That Person on TV Before!

So, I would have expected to see the usual suspects of NYC small-time players on the Boston vs. New York show, which continues to be so bad I can't stand watching it. I wouldn't really expect it on any other show.

However, right there on the first main event episode, the feature table includes someone I know. Heck, it's even someone that I know well enough to have a pretty strong read on! I was really surprised to see her — still staring at the board when she misses and calling raises with AJo. It's Steph, someone I shared the tables with for many hours at the old O and U Clubs. Until tonight, I knew her only by her first name, as first names only is pretty typical at our semi-legal clubs around the city. Turns out she's Stephanie “windough” Klempner and seems to be PokerStars most ESPN-covered player of the 2006 main event, as she landed on the first day's television table with Phil Hellmuth.

Now, I can't speak to Steph's tournament game, but I suppose now that she's famous, I can take some liberty to make a public comment about what I know of her cash game. Truth is that (at least about six months ago) she was still one of the more beatable regulars that I encountered around the NYC clubs.

However, the big plus side is that she was always a great person to have at the table. Unlike most of the totality of NYC players, she's a kind, friendly person who is polite to everyone. That's a big exception to most of what you see around here. The saying about all NYCers being rude isn't really true in general, but it is almost completely true at the poker table. Steph was always an exception.

So, while I don't think Steph's skill is representative of what can be found in the small games of NYC poker, I'm sure that she, probably by a long shot, made a better impression of proper etiquette at a poker table than most NYC players would have. I'm glad that Steph won her satellite, and sorry she didn't cash. I don't think anyone could pick a kinder player as the token NYC small-time player for the main event.

(Because of his appearance on the first Boston vs. New York, Alfonse has previously been held up as “the quintessential NYC small-time poker player” in the media, and that's just embarrassing to us all. Too bad Steph didn't get enough air time to kill that image.)