Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 13 November 2009 / Leave a comment

In his excellent book "Amarillo Slim in a world full of fat people" Amarillo Slim makes the excellent observation that: 'You can shear a sheep many times, but only skin him once'.

You are nearly always much better off trying to take consistent small wins over people who are considerably worse than you, than just going for one big one, which will typically make them want to stop playing you for good.

What Slim is alluding to here is that you are nearly always much better off trying to take consistent small wins over people who are considerably worse than you, than just going for one big one, which will typically make them want to stop playing you for good.

Imagine you encounter a player who just folds too much. They come into the same poker room at a similar time each day and plays for a while against any player they want. You know that this player will lose to you constantly over the long run, just by you stealing their blinds that few more times than necessary.

The optimal strategy if you were to only see this player once is to go hell for leather at them, raising every hand until you bust them. However, if you have the prospect of future matches, you are much better off employing a weaker strategy against them, as the go for broke approach against them will probably just make them feel uncomfortable about losing so much so quickly to you, which will remove the chance of future games with them.

Another great example of this phenomenon in action is in that other great gambling game of skill, pool. Pool is fundamentally different from poker, in that the variance is much lower, and is considerably easier to identify who is the best player if everyone involved is giving their all, and as a result, players have to frequently ease up on weaker opponents in order to try and keep them in the game. You stand to win much more from a weak player in pool games if you win matches by slim margins over a few weeks, than if you just go out and thrash them one day.

The manipulation of the image that you give your opponent is crucial in all skill based gambling games. You have to appear to not be very far out of the league of anyone you are playing, even if you are, as no one likes playing against people that they have no chance of beating. If you spot a very weak player at the table, do not just necessarily try and walk over them as quickly as possible.

If they are up for future matches, it is much better to go easy on them and just try and grind out consistent small wins, as in the long run these will add up to much greater sums of money than a one night thrashing.

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