Is a poker boot camp the best way to improve your game? We decided to find out for oursleves

It is a Saturday morning at Foxwoods Resort Casino. Normally, I’d be making a beeline for the joint’s sprawl of poker tables, hoping to take advantage of the tired and lame who are chasing last night’s losses. Not today, though. Instead, I proceed to a staid conference room where breakfast has been laid out and 60 or so people expect to get $ 1,895 worth of tournament hold’em advice over the next day-and-a- half. Welcome to WPT Boot Camp, an intense group tutorial, put on by the folks at World Poker Tour.

BOOT UP

Attendees here range from a middle-aged executive whose wife paid his tuition, to a hard-bitten gambler who thinks he understands everything there is to know about the game, to a smattering of guys in their early 20s who play actively online. They all hope that TJ Cloutier, tournament pro Rick Fuller, Bernard Lee (who finished 13th in the 2005 main event), and online specialist Nick Brancato will put them in position to tear up the tournament circuit.

One member of the Camp’s youthful contingent, Dave Gregory, wears a Full Tilt hat and Moneymaker-style shades. He’s got the look, the lingo, and the attitude down pat. But does he have game? ‘My problem is that I tend to bubble a lot of tournaments – I need to get beyond that,’ says Gregory, who’s enthusiastic about poker and expects to make money from it. ‘I’m hoping that advice from TJ will get me there.’ He’s not the only one in need of help. ‘Everyone has leaks and the idea is to repair them,’ says camper Ralph Pavone. ‘For me, betting is what I need to fix. I am looking for a stronger feel of what to do when I hold certain hands in specific situations.’

The big question looms: Is it possible that two workdays of lessons, play, and observation can turn mediocre players into winners? ‘The boot camp is about establishing a base foundation and taking it from there,’ says instructor Lee. ‘The odds of a world-class player coming out of here are slim. But you don’t know anyone’s degree of commitment. Look at me. Four years ago, I was reading TJ’s book and just starting to become serious. You’ll see people here learning and getting better. That is what it’s all about.’

The widespread desire is best summed up by an Australian named Karl Baldock who hopes to eventually turn pro. ‘I see this as a method for getting to the next level without losing a lot of money along the way,’ he says. Of course, he won’t know whether or not that’s happened till months after boot camp has broken up.

Stuffed full of bacon and eggs, attendees pile into a classroom setting and sit around felt-topped poker tables, ready to glean knowledge. It begins with the basics: don’t bet in early position unless you can withstand a raise, limping from the small blind with weak holdings can get you into real trouble when one of your cards hit on the flop and never open limp. Most attendees recognise that brushing up on poker’s basics can only be good. Some appear to be hearing all of this for the first time.

Sitting to my right, the guy who already thinks he has his game down pat tells me, ‘People spent a lot of money to be here. We better learn something.’

MORE THAN WORDS

In reality, boot camp is more than a learning experience. After day one ends, attendees compete in a tournament with a potentially serious prize, expenses and entry into a second tournament, the Battle for the Season Pass III in the Dominican Republic. The winner there receives 10 WPT main event seats plus expense money, all valued at $ 110,000. Tonight’s prize, which includes travel and tutorials and tournament entry, is worth $ 4,495.

If that doesn’t provide an incentive to pay attention, nothing will. And most of the students are all ears. They lap up the old-school wisdom proffered by TJ Cloutier who insists, for example, that if you’re going to call an all-in bet on the river, you’re better off making the bet yourself. ‘That way, you might get someone to fold a superior hand,’ he says. ‘Or else you can get one more bet in there, and it pays off if you have the superior hand.’

When someone says that scare-cards unnerve him, Cloutier practically rolls his eyes. ‘If cards scare you,’ he drawls, ‘you shouldn’t play poker.’

Following a video that depicts Phil Hellmuth at his brattiest, Cloutier steps up to acknowledge that Phil is actually a good guy. Then he offers strong opinions on the practicalities of probe betting. ‘Anytime you’re going to put money in the pot to find out where you are, you don’t deserve to play poker. Bet second- pair as a bluff or for value, but don’t probe bet. Nobody can tell me why they would bet to get information,’ he says.

Beyond seeing the technique as a waste of money, Nick Brancato advises that it creates patterns and signals weakness. ‘I’m going to raise every time you do it,’ he vows. ‘Or else I’ll just take the pot away from you on the next street.’

Reacting, perhaps, to the studious, new-school nature of boot camp, Cloutier makes it clear that by-the-book information goes only so far: ‘We’re not telling you the way we play. We’re telling you the right way to play. You can bet that we stray away from this a fair amount of the time.’

Truthful as it may be, the admission might derail poker players who need no excuses to play idiosyncratically. After all, they are here specifically to learn the golden rule and overcome deeply ingrained bad habits.

The test comes that night, in the Foxwoods’ poker room, at the boot camp tournament. Has any of the advice taken hold? Have preliminary sit&gos, with pros as dealers/critics, proved their worth? As the cards are dealt, the answer becomes clear. Overall, the students’ collective level of play has gone through some kind of evolution. Earlier, there had been a lot of tentative decision making, people betting odd amounts and limping in with weird holdings. A few hours into this tournament, however, with half the class on the rail, the remaining players bet smoothly, eyeball their opponents for tells and fold sucker hands.

As one guy, who drove down from Canada, puts it to me, ‘before this class, I would have been raising with J-10 from any position. Now, not so much. I got unlucky on an all-in bet, but my game has improved. I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth already.’

As for the hold’em know-it-all, he busted out early and is nowhere to be seen.

SCHOOL’S OUT

On Sunday morning, at the start of session two, some students are late, a couple appear hungover, many have the glazed look of people who’ve been up all night playing poker. In this school, that should count for extra credit.

No worse for wear is peppy Adam Firestone. He managed to win the tournament and will be heading to the Dominican Republic in three months. ‘I was all-in with a small stack, got lucky, and won,’ he remembers. ‘Then I pushed all-in again, won again. I rebuilt from there and wound up taking the whole thing.’

Did the class help? ‘I’ve been playing poker since I was 17 and thought I knew everything about the game,’ says Firestone who is now in his early 20s. ‘I’ve learned a lot here about changing it up and playing position which I’ve never paid enough attention to. Also, I am playing fewer hands. That is definitely a big deal.’

There seems to be three important tournament tips and concepts that get exposed over these couple days. The first tip is if you are in the big blind and everyone folds to the small blind, who limps, that should be an automatic raise, regardless of what you have (the small blind has shown so much weakness that his money is ripe for taking). Secondly, If you are on the button and everybody folds to you, that should be an automatic raise, regardless of what you have (you’ll usually steal the blinds).

Lastly is Nick Brancato’s display of the mathematics behind betting big with strong pocket cards. He runs numbers to prove that the more opponents you have in a hand, the less likely you are to lead after the flop (with more live cards out there, somebody is increasingly likely to hit, even if some of the original callers fold post-flop) and the more critical it may be to get away from an impressive starting hand.

WPT boot camp concludes with all four instructors collaborating as a single player in a Full Tilt sit&go. Everybody can see the decision-making processes unfolding upon a big monitor, but, unfortunately, the single-table tournament is fairly dull. We don’t witness a whole lot of brilliant poker before Team WPT busts out. This doesn’t seem to bother anyone, and the students chant for one more go at it. But there just isn’t time.

Before things break up, I take a quick survey on what people got out of the class. Did this costly weekend at Foxwoods actually ratchet up skill levels? A Floridian by the name of Frank Smith answers in the affirmative. He expects to take lessons from the camp and use them to stick it to a particularly obnoxious, winning player in his home game. ‘I’m ordinarily tight,’ he admits. ‘But now I understand the need to be more aggressive with strong cards. He’s going to pay me off.’

Another student tells me about snagging second place in a sit&go the previous night. The money-finish was particularly sweet because he outlasted instructor, Bernard Lee. ‘Using what I learned in the class,’ he says, ‘I played tight-aggressive and got a reputation at the table. It put me in a good position to steal, which I had not previously been able to do.’

Other players chime in with what they’re taking home. Some mention a new understanding that limpers must be raised pre-flop (one happy camper gushes, ‘I did it, and you know what? It works. The limpers folded!’). Also highlighted is the importance of being more selective about hands, letting the small blind go without appropriately playable cards and trying to find tells.

Indeed, these lessons have been quickly picked up and rationalised. But will they endure? Will the students go back to their home games, online tournaments, and local casinos and play the pitch-perfect poker preached by boot camp instructors? ‘Hopefully,’ comes one sheepish reply. ‘You’ve got to work at it – you need the discipline. But now that I know what to do, I am sure that a few things will stay with me and form the basis of making me a better poker player.’

Along with your boot camp try reading PokerPlayer magazine HERE for 24 pages of monthly poker strategy