Bart Hanson is a respected poker coach, owner of CrushLivePoker, and professional commentator (most notably during the Jack-Four hand controversy last year). He recently made his first appearance on Daniel "Jungleman" Cates' show, Winning the Game of Life.
We grabbed some of the most interesting parts of their chat, which ranged from live game strategy to poker in China. You can watch the full interview below:
Daniel Cates – All right, so I'm here today with one of, or the best, live poker coaches for low stakes or for all stakes. I'm not sure, are you the best coach for all live stakes poker?
Bart Hanson – I never said I was the best. I think that was other people that responded to you on Twitter. But I would say that probably 80, maybe 80 to 90% of the people that sign up for my site, and I've been doing it for a long, long time, mainly play $2/$5 or below. So I'm not, you know, Phil Galfond, you know what I mean?
And, when I saw your tweet about live exploitable play, I was like, "Wow, I'm going to, I'm going to hop right on this." Because I think a lot of people go to me because I've been playing pretty much full-time since 2003, although I'm not really playing full-time anymore in my advanced age. I've seen a lot of hands of live poker and what certain patterns mean. I've got to be honest with you, I mean, the game's changed a little bit, but I see some of the same s*** at $2/$5 that I have... that you would never really see, that you would never really know unless you were sort of in the weeds.
I don't know if you went through that period, I don't know how long you played online poker for Dan...
DC – What period are you talking about? The $2/$5 live period?
BH – No, the period where they outlawed [online poker], the Black Friday period, like 2011, 2012.
DC – I went through Black Friday. I had the biggest roll stuck on that site.
BH – So I remember when I was playing full-time $5/$10 Commerce, right, $1500 cap, and I remember all of a sudden, you know, that happened. The DOJ seized all the sites, and then you just saw an influx of young guys with money, right? And it was specifically because they couldn't play online anymore. Some of them, it took them a while really to adjust, and the good ones did adjust, but you just knew right away that they had no idea. "Oh, I don't have to be balanced. What does this mean when this guy does this and then bets this sizing?"
You know, you can play like a GTO optimal type of style live, and obviously, it's going to win, but that's not going to bring in the most amount of money. I think that's always like the most confusing thing for some people. They're like, "What is GTO? I want to learn GTO." I've certainly brought stuff into my game as well just so that I know what the baseline is, but you can certainly win a lot more, I would say even at $5/$10 sometimes and below, by taking non-equilibrium lines.
DC – Oh yeah, I hope so. Hope there's money in this game. That's a problem if there's not money in this game. Well, being the best coach for even these stakes or whatever, finding exploits for these guys live is quite an asset.
What are these crazy things that you're referring to live? Are you talking about the live tell stuff or betting patterns?
BH – Yeah, I'm not a big, big guy on live tells. What's the guy's name? Cacaro and the other guy...
DC – Mike Caro.
BH – Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not huge on that, but I will say, first of all, to answer your question, it's betting patterns for sure.
I have a list I call them the small stakes exploits. I made a course, and I made like 20 small-stakes exploits, they call it. One of the things as it relates to live tells, I actually think is bet pacing.
What is Bet Pacing?
Now, what does bet pacing mean? The speed in which somebody bets.
I think a perfect example of that is if someone's driving action, especially if your opponent's driving action, especially in position because they can check and take showdowns.
There might be a card that might come on the river where, no matter what they have, if they're not bluffing – no matter what they have – it should take some pause. They should pause to think about what they are going to bet, whether it's if they have the nuts or they are thinking about sizing.
Like if they're representing a flush in a certain situation and then all of a sudden the board pairs, or if they're representing a flush in a certain situation, then like a fourth suit comes out. If they don't think about what their bet size is, a lot of times you can sort of deem from that that they don't have what they're representing. Because any hand would call for them to actually think about like a nut-changing card at the end.
What Are Bet Patterns?
I mean, I think one of the simplest things that I teach is like, sometimes, especially if you take a small c-bet sizing, like on a board of, say, like or something like that, maybe with a two-to-a-flush. If you take a small c-bet sizing or medium c-bet sizing, and somebody sort of makes a very small raise, and they're somewhat of a recreational player from out of position, like they make a small check-raise.
Let's say you have an overpair and you continue. If a card comes that is a blank, not a sort of nut-changing card, but just like a pure blank. Maybe might be a better example. , two flush, turns a . If they come out from out of position with the same bet or less, so maybe you bet 50 and they check-raise to 125, and you call, and then that turn bet on a blank is 125 or less, that is always, always just basically capped. I don't really like that term, but it just usually means top pair, like a weakish top pair that was sort of check-raising for protection. Almost always. That's one of the best sort of bet sizing patterns that I continue to see.
Now, people can sometimes get a little bit confused because if the board was like, you know, , and a guy had , and he check-raised you, and you called, and you weren't really sure what he had, and then the turn was a , and he follows up with a small bet, that doesn't mean that he only has top pair. He could have , he's just scared now of or scared of other like two pair types of things. I'm talking specifically like kind of on a blank-ish card on the turn. That's one of the tried and true bet patterns, stuff like that.
High-Stakes Farmer Games and Coaching in China
BH – I actually spent a lot of time in Macau, so like at the Wynn and then semi-private games at StarWorld. I spent some time in Shenzhen, I spent some time in Beijing, I spent some time in Guangzhou.
I remember sitting behind a guy who lived in some really small city – like a million people in China, that's a small city. I don't know, like 70 miles northwest of Beijing, and it was like this game, it was almost like a farmers' game. Like these guys were country, country guys, but they were playing the equivalent of like $200/$400 No-Limit.
I remember sitting there, like they were at a kitchen table smoking cigarettes, throwing the butts on the floor. The place was just disgusting, like the bathrooms... like the open sewage smell from the bathroom. But these guys were playing the equivalent of like $200/$400 No-Limit, man. It was intense. So I was all over – Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai, just like all over the place. I didn't really get to the South or to the West.
Shenzhen is an interesting story too because Shenzhen is a city that's right across the border from Hong Kong. My primary client used to take the helicopter from Shenzhen to Macau because you could take the boat, like the ferry, or you could take a helicopter from Hong Kong and Shenzhen. But Shenzhen was a city where, I think like 30-40 years ago, it only had like 20-30,000 people. And then they made some sort of trade rule, China made a trade rule to try to compete with Hong Kong. Fast forward 30-40 years later, it's like 15-20 million. Like, it just... it's amazing. So just stuff in China, like there are so many cities with like over 5-10 million people that we've never even heard of here. It's just crazy.
DC – I've been to a few myself. They're very impressive. I got a new perspective on China seeing some of those cities.
BH – I was always really treated well there, and I don't know if it was just because I was the coach, but I really liked it. The interesting thing though, and part of the reason why my sort of coaching kind of wound down, has to do with the political system. Like a lot of those guys who are really, really wealthy, they just got out of China. They're out of China
DC – It's the new government there.
BH – They just know that the clock's running and at any time, maybe the government could be like, "We're actually going to be socialist-communist. Why do you have all this money? We're taking it."
DC – My understanding is that the government is actually doing its job and doing the right thing and a lot of these super rich guys are doing all sorts of bad things. That's my current understanding, I don't really know, but that was what I was told, that actually, it's it's not just because they have a bunch of money, it's more they got money for bad reasons. I don't know.
BH – Well, I'll tell you a rule that really put these guys up against the wall. Unless the law has changed, I remember that there was a law in China where you could only take out the equivalent of $50,000 US out of the country per year, or maybe even for a lifetime. So these guys were so rich, they had to figure out a way to get money out of the country. Sometimes you see that on the West Coast with a lot of these houses or big buildings in New York and San Francisco owned by, paid for by cash, by people in China. That's them trying to get their money out.
I know that there were a lot of those sketchy-ass jewelry stores and stuff outside of the Wynn, like in Macau.
Lots of money laundering. One of the biggest junkets... A junket is another thing people don't have a concept of here. A junket is sort of like a group. If you're a rich guy and you want to gamble on baccarat and go into the casino, a junket will sort of put your package together, get your hotel, stuff like that. But they also bank behind the house. So if somebody was playing at the Wynn like $5,000 per hand, the junket would take 10 times that amount behind on their action. So the guy was actually betting $50,000, but he was betting $5,000 with the casino, but then like $50,000 behind with the junket. And the junket would sometimes have like their own private casinos in the casino. But I had heard that one of those junkets really got busted up.
I think it was Sun City or something like that, recently. And then the other thing too that I find interesting over there's is the kind of a similar type of system that I equate to when online poker was somewhat legal here where everybody would bet offshore with the Caribbean sites. This is like the mid... this might predate you... Like mid-2000s, a lot of offshore gambling that was like in Curacao and stuff like that. (Editor note: CoinPoker is one of the rooms licensed from Curacao).
That kind of goes on in China but in the Philippines, 'cause you're not supposed to be gambling online in China, it's illegal. But a lot of companies service Chinese citizens and the industry is all in the Philippines. But they can't necessarily block it, so there's this whole, whole thing with that. So it's really, it's really interesting situation over there with gambling.
DC – I know that there's some kind of game that was played that there's this guy whose nickname was Chairman, and he was not... he's not a pro in the game that we played, but he apparently played some incredibly high stakes games somewhere in China. And it must have been much bigger, and the game that he played, at least with us, was like a 10 million US buy-in.
BH – Wow, my God.
DC – But I don't know what game he played in China, but I heard it was like incredibly high, like people that run the country and that kind of thing.
I mean, it wouldn't surprise me. People might think, well, how do they pay all this money back and forth? And that's where the junkets come in to this too. Like, I put money here like in this city and then it somehow gets to Macau and I can play it. There definitely needs to be intermediaries. So if the government's kind of going after that type of behavior, they sort of go after the intermediaries, which is why you see like the... these issues with the junkets and things like that.
DC – Oh, okay. I don't really know a lot about that, to be honest. All I know is that China's government appears to be doing its job. Okay, who would have thought? Like, lack of corruption.
Matter of fact, one thing I recently learned about China is that I went to Sanya recently, which is the island south of nearby Hong Kong, poker's allowed to operate there because they're showing the government that they're doing good things and that sort of stuff, even doing some charity. So it's not because they're bribing officials or something like that, it's because they're showing poker to be mostly a good thing and they're packaging it a little bit differently than this like degen game. So I thought, "Okay, this is an interesting lesson for America and these kinds of things."
BH – So is that the island that begins with an H? Hainan? Because that was the only place that I thought that gambling was tolerated or legal in China and actually mainland China.
DC – Yeah, it's like not really legal but they tolerate it and it's called Hainan. I thought it was actually... Yeah, risky situation, but it doesn't sound that risky on second thought just because it basically works because people are doing the right thing.
As a matter of fact, believe it or not, they're actually making situations that are a bit more beneficial towards VIPs, like not multiple entry tournaments and they give some deals on the rooms and other things.
BH – Well, one of the things they used to do in Macau at the Wynn, was in the highest game, they used to keep a seat open for the VIP.
Yeah, they still do that. They do, but they don't really do that. Maybe it's just 'cause our games are more sort of curated like at the private level, but they're not going to have a game that's public where they're just keeping one seat open where there's a list. Maybe it's a little bit different now because of these quasi-private games like in casinos, but it never used to be that way.
DC – Well, I still think that's a good practice for the US. The Chinese have quite a few good practices. So no more giant pots or crazy weird things that happened in China that you're forgetting to mention?
BH – No, nothing really. There was nothing really crazy. And but again, dealing with that level of wealth... I mean, there were guys that would go on tilt, like going raging tilt. No one was really pissed that they... It wasn't necessarily about the money necessarily, it was just about the fact that they lost. So it's just kind of a different... Like I said, it's just a different level of when somebody's got so much money and... and they love the gamble. The maniacal play, doing crazy shit when they lose to try to like get it back. But for the most part, there wasn't anything like you'd ever see at Hollywood Park, like some sort of fistfight or something like that, you know what I mean? It was... It was all pretty... It was all pretty contained.
DC – Sure. One thing, one story I've heard, by the way, the origins of Short Deck is that allegedly someone lost like an enormous amount one day and they started tearing up all the bad cards like the twos, threes, fours, and then everyone just kept playing and that was how short deck was born.
BH – That's pretty cool. I hope that's how it happened.
Bart Hanson's full chat with Jungleman is available on YouTube. During the interview, Bart also goes in-depth about poker strategy, the future of PLO, and lots of useful wisdom for live poker.