The Genius of Doyle

A Legend Has Left Us. His Gifts Can Never Be Repaid.

Imagine there are no solvers. No discussion forums. No poker books. Imagine taking up a game whose legality is murky at best—risking life and limb to play it. And imagine having to figure all the strategy out on your own.

As impossible at it is to imagine even attempting such a task, now imagine you not only try, but you succeed. You succeed to the point where you publish your strategies in book form, bringing millions of new players and a much-needed respectability to your pastime. Most astounding of all, the strategies you worked out with nothing but a deck of cards and your own brain hold up. For decades, there are almost no tweaks needed to your core ideas. Somehow, you got everything pretty much right the first time around.

Not content with merely being the first and most important poker theorist, you instead stay one step ahead of the game for the rest of your long life, competing at the highest level at an age when most people have been retired for twenty-plus years. In so doing, you are a link to No Limit Hold ’Em’s origins—a reminder that if it wasn’t for you, it’s unlikely any of us would be out here playing for trophies, rings, bracelets.

I never had the honor of meeting Doyle Brunson, so I can’t offer any anecdotes about what he was like as a person. But I can say that his impact on poker, at the macro and micro levels, cannot be overstated. More than a legend, he was The Original. The game will never see anyone like him again.

Here are just a few strategic concepts Doyle first laid out in 1979. Nineteen. Seventy-nine. We might call them by different names today, but Doyle thought them up first. Judge for yourself how they’ve held up. (All quotes from Super System 2, which uses a very slightly updated version of Doyle’s original text.)

Floating: “For example, say I have a 10-9 and, with $10,000 in the pot, the flop comes 8-3-2. With a raggedy flop like that, my opponent—a tight player, let’s say—might try to pick up that pot with a post-oak bluff of $1,200. Well that’s a gutless bet, and I’ll call it trying to catch a jack or a 7, just so I can get an open-end straight draw on fourth street. Of course, I’m hoping to catch a 10 or 9, and I’m in a good position to pick up the pot on fourth street, whether I improve or not.”

Semibluffing: “Whenever I make a substantial bet or raise, I’ve usually got an out. Betting with an out, that’s what I call it. And it’s the out I have that makes me appear lucky when I’m a dog in a big pot and wind up winning it.”

C-Betting: “For example, whenever I raise before the flop I’m going to bet after the flop about 90 percent of the time.”

These concepts appear in the first few pages of Doyle’s text! Not only are they still applicable, but the ability to float and semibluff at opportune times tends to separate good players from great ones even today.

Go a bit deeper into the Super System chapter, and you’ll find gems such as this one, about playing non-AK offsuit broadway hands:

“I call these borderline hands because I’d question calling a raise with them. If they’re suited, I’ll call a raise with them and take a flop.”

Decades later…this is pretty much exactly what the solvers said.

Doyle surely made a lot of money playing, promoting, and writing about poker, but those profits pale in comparison to the value he added to poker as a whole. Almost everything we love about our game, we owe to him.

Rest in peace to Doyle Brunson, our founding father.