Honor Thy Villains
Written by: Sasha Sutton
We’re rebels and loners. Or so we think. In reality, low-stakes cash players are often tribal copycats. And we love trends. The trend we love today is aggression.
Hip, violent poker metaphors give us permission—crush, dominate, destroy, own. Words condition us early in our poker lives to be felt-storming banshees—cool, tough, Edward Norton-ish. There’s a reason The Art of War is seductive. Tons of us are down with the war thing. Hand for hand we see ourselves as heroic. Fake soldiers taught to stalk muscle and sway. This is aggression’s tactical side. The side sold on many training sites without much nuance since three-, four-, and five-betting (often light) have become usual and customary.
Battle Lines
Aggression today is more than what it’s always been—a tool we need to win. It’s become a racy bellicose word whose assumptions aren’t much explored.
Is there really only one path to victory? Lots of hyper-LAGs print money. Nits print money, too. And have through the decades, though as a class, they’re scorned. In Vegas, it can be the nastiest insult of all.
In game flow, aggression as “style” can mean bigger swings. Which is great for gigantor-whales who have fat bankrolls and the mental fortitude to withstand the variance. Tighter grinders, rec players, and tourists may prefer less fluctuation and stack-bounce. In a perfect world, there’d be no judgment.
Hearts, Souls
The flip side of blind aggression is quieter, grounded in a collective, more compassionate ideology. In 2006, Aaron Brown wrote The Poker Face of Wall Street, a seminal progressive text. Not for nothing, Brown leans toward love, something closer to the Japanese notion of “respectful battle”:
“You don’t struggle against an opponent in poker; you play with a table of people,” Brown wrote. “You don’t win by dominating opponents. You win by finding a profitable strategic niche that is in no one’s interest to destroy.
“To be successful, your goal cannot be to inflict maximum losses on everyone…any more than price gouging [in a retail context] is smart business,” Brown added.
Not inflicting maximum loss. Brown’s beating heart might invite scorn since poker’s top-gun aggressors are 21st-century gladiators. The harder-core eating villains. Crowds roaring with delight. Power.
Fetus, Me
At the start of my New York cash life what did I know about the messy habits of unstudied recreational players? I longed to be a baller thug like the big kids with their Grand-Canyon ranges, bloated opens, and manic bluffs—a dazzle of goofy lines and zero strategy.
My ignorance aside, low-stakes fellas, suited to combat, seemed to storm their way into their poker smarts. They had learned to play in their pals’ high-school basements. They drank and drugged and stayed up all night and got fearless. Their aggression shaped my nascent sense of a tricky game. They bartered in domination.
Got Milk?
The license to aggress arrives in a boy’s breast milk. Girls get different milk. Different permission that translates less into the EV of combo draws and more into the EV of Barbie dolls and a crap ton of mascara.
Trends aside, women are taught to follow different rules. Planet Earth invites a man’s vigor. Yet tighter, mascara-less women are called names, while men get to be beasts and ballers. Scary “aggressive” women shouldn’t get away with their raises, while men invoke competitive privilege as a social baseline. Women heads-up are in “cat fights.” Men heads-up are simply playing poker.
Engage Wisely
Beyond traditional card muscle, it would seem ego-infused bullying is baked into the game’s post-modern onslaughts. Winning for some is no longer enough. We might also humiliate, so egos are shredded, villains cry, and they don’t dare three-bet us from the blinds.
A few years back, a pro posted in a forum: “Aggression is used for one purpose: to break the will of your opponent. You hammer and hammer to the point where you take their soul. All the math and strategy in the world isn’t going to help when [they] literally lose [their] minds.”
Not surprisingly, poker mindset mastermind Tommy Angelo rejected chest-pounding as a commandment.
“You need to play all the notes in the scale,” he suggested. “If you’re facing younger, more-forceful players, don’t engage on their terms. Don’t play their game on their court. If they are doing a certain thing, look at some ‘other thing’ as a profit source.”
Angelo steered me to Tip 39 in his ground-breaking Elements of Poker. I loved this idea as a counter-balance to the blind worship of aggression:
“Games change, opponents change, we change, like three pendulums, swinging in a chaotic dance of tight and loose, passive and aggressive. The Professional calls upon extreme tightness and extreme looseness, extreme passiveness and extreme aggressiveness, and everything in between, at every moment. His full range of options is always in play.”
Farm Animals
With 44 years in the game, my cousin Mick Katzman was grinding high stakes NLHE in a wealthy SoCal suburb. He respected Amarillo Slim’s famous restraint—more sheering, less skinning.
“One night we were short-handed,” Mick recalled. “I’d been quietly taking notes on this one guy for months. The young toughs today think it’s clever to mercilessly fleece so-called suckers and leave them bloodied and crying in their SUVs. True, I had a deep book and took this player for thousands. But I embarrassed him and he never came back. Who won that night?” he asked plaintively. “I’ll never do it again.”
I quickly thought of Terry Dobson and Victor Miller, quoted in Aikido in Everyday Life: “Destroyed people make bad enemies.”
Unhip Compassion
Larry Phillips beat the kindness curve 19 years ago when he published the remarkable Zen and the Art of Poker. “If you show respect for the other players in the game, they are likely to see you as a player who is playing at the next level, not one who is merely (and greedily, blindly) mired in his own self-interest. They are more likely to respect your play and avoid taking mean-spirited and underhanded (and unpredictable) measures.”
Yet and still he honored assertion. “This does not mean they will lay off when playing against you or play less hard, it simply means fairness, consideration, and straightforward play. It means stability and harmony. These things are all to your advantage.”
And I loved Phillips’ anti-testosterone thing: “Dismiss the idea that poker is a case of two gunslingers going at it head to head, one of whom is about to lose his manhood.”
Dybbuks And Angel
Aaron and Tommy and Mick are in the minority yet have had a profound effect on my game. Especially in tough Vegas rooms where as it happens, the smart generals guide the way.
Chinese military strategist Zhuge Liang once wrote, “Sages follow the rules of heaven; the wise obey the laws of earth; the intelligent follow precedent. Harm comes to the arrogant; calamity visits the proud.”
About Sasha Sutton:
A devoted Vegas cash grinder, mindset coach, and fiction writer, Sasha’s poker book “The Total Poker Manual” is visually singular and ideal for those starting out. Connect with her at www.suttonstories.com, or on Bluesky @pokerforgirls.bsky.social. She loves to talk the game, especially with women.
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