Poker News

Mike Caro, The ‘Mad Genius’ of Poker

So where did this “Mad Genius of Poker” thing originate?

Mike Caro appears to have given the question some careful thought.

The world has seen that look in countless print ads hyping the 61-year-old Caro’s strategies for playing more effective poker . . .

Caro eyeing the camera with the slightly frantic air of a man who’s suddenly remembered he’s supposed to be somewhere else. Caro holding a couple cards extended, his vanishing hair going this way and that. Would you take poker lessons from this man?

Thousands have lined up over the years do to exactly that, just as they have also bought his books, read his how-to columns over more than 25 years and considered his contributions to poker legend Doyle Brunson’s pair of best-selling books. Caro was the founding editor of POKER PLAYER, this publication’s predecessor.

He’s been one of poker’s best-known strategists and commentators for decades and doesn’t deny his appetite for the attention he gets. There’s nothjng like the ego stroking.

A bit of an ego maniac, huh?

“I AM an ego maniac,” he smirks, voice rising but keeping his explanations within a certain rhythm. He’s said these things before and has the routine down pat.

“If we were to hold a tournament to determine the world champion ego maniac, I would definitely make the final table.” A long pause before going on, “but I wouldn’t be the winner. No, the final would probably be Phil Hellmuth going heads up with David Sklansky.” But back to the opening question, which still hangs there unanswered . . .

Caro’s thinking about it, giving his questioner time to speculate idly.

Did the Mad Genius thing spring fully formed from extended conversations with savvy image experts? Was it the result of thoughtful nurturing by parents who spent long evenings around the family poker table, young Mikey shuffling chips with one hand, trying to decide whether dad was bluffing him with pocket deuces?

The answer, Caro finally says, giving it the sound of someone torn between going for the joke or a serious response, is that his essential approach to poker and life itself have always been seasoned with a tendency to search for this view of the unacknowledged truth that often lay just beyond the grasp of most people, always doing just about everything HIS way. Going for that added touch of spice, metaphorically speaking, like Emeril deciding to “kick it up a notch.”

“You don’t get to be a mad genius over night. It takes years and years of trial and error. There’s the perspiration . . . till you wake up one day and realize you’re there, you’re mad.” And there is no going back.

In the beginning, his desire was to write, and that’s what he did, taking full control of his high school newspaper and, selling the first short story he ever wrote to a men’s magazine. Way back in the mid-1960s.

Poker had little to do with anything that was front and center in his life. The game and its possibilities would not begin to consume him until the 1960s when he discovered the magical town of Gardena, Ca., this place where there were clubs devoted to poker.

Was that unbelievable, or what. Sounded to Caro like some kind of enchanted land. It definitely deserved further examination. He remembers stopping a policeman in Pomona, another LA suburb, telling the cop that he had heard there were legal card clubs in the area. Would the officer be so kind as to point him in the right direction?

The cop scowled, studying the young man before him carefully, and said wherever they were they were sure as hell not in Pomona. And that was that. Caro did eventually discover Gardena and fell into the rhythm of things.

Over time he became the kind of five-card draw player Brunson, the twotime World Series of Poker champ, wanted as he thought about the necessary chapters for his first Super System.

Who was the best fivecard stud player? Brunson asked around. He kept hearing Caro’s name and decided to check him out, watching his card table antics, shaking his head and chuckling at the style of this “crazy Mike.” Which was to evolve over time into “The Mad Genius of Poker.”

Caro was playing a lot of poker at the time, but was also tuned to his interest in writing. A now defunct magazine known as Escapade had bought that initial story.

It was the Christmas 1965 issue. Caro eventually lost his copies somewhere along the highway of life and if anyone has a copy he would like to hear from them.

Caro was willing to go where the chance to write took him. He thought seriously about writing for the screen, until he discovered that he would be required to join the Screen Writers Guild.

“I wouldn’t say that I was anti-union but I definitely did not want to be coerced into doingsomething. To me, at the time, joining the union would put me in conflict with my stronger desire to be a free spirit.”

A moment of thinking about that, “I was a stubborn man back then.”

Caro had heard terms such as “prodigy” used to describe him all through his high school years in Colorado where he was given the newspaper to take care of - students were traditionally elected to participate in the production of the paper. The principal took Mike aside he didn’t have to come to class, but punctuated it with this cautionary note. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

There was a condition of sorts. “Here’s what I’m gonna do,” the principal told him. “There are six grading periods in the school year and I’m going to give you five A’s and one F.”

Caro thought this sounded like a deal he could live with and said as much, feeling comfortable that the principal would relent and give him that sixth A.

But he didn’t.

Fresh out of high school, Caro decided do become a draftsman for the Colorado High Department. “I knew nothing about being a draftsman, but I was able to pass the sort of civil Service test that they had with a score of 100 - this was all that mattered - and it was enough to get me in.”

He lasted there about three months. He was not yet 21 when he responded to the ad that landed him the job as sports editor for the Grand Island Daily Independent in Nebraska.

“I attacked the horse racing there, mostly because I did not want it to be on the sports pages. I was easily offended back then because I was always looking for a cause. In this case, he argued that racing could not be considered a sport as such because different horses had to carry different weights. “

He remembers a famous miler, Peter Snell, a Nebraskan who was among the first to break the fourminute mile.

“My argument was that if horse racing was a sport than Snell should be carrying a bowling ball when he runs.”

More than 40 years later he looks back at this chapter in the perils of Mike Caro. “I was out there for anything that would give me a thrill or get me attention.”

Attention was what Caro got, the sort of attention that had him leaving the Independent after about three months and striking out on the next chapter in his life. He had fallen off the fast track to a career in Nebraska journalism.

There was another story for the Independent, one that’s remembered down with a chuckle. “The paper wanted me to go out to one of the high schools and talk to the football players.

I thought that was a little beneath me and came back with this very sarcastic piece about their favorite foods.”

Just one more reason for Caro to think very seriously about going somewhere else.

Caro responded to the lure of California in the 1960s and played poker for years before Brunson’s invitation to participate in the first Super System. His first instinct was to say, thanks but no thanks. Why give away what he figured were his own profitable secrets?

“But Doyle is massively charming and very persuasive.” Caro was also enticed by the chance to put together what he says were the first accurate published statistics about poker. Something like this, he says, had never existed before.

He took his time considering the substance of Brunson’s request and eventually “dove in head-first, helping him with many aspects of the book. I just became enamored with Doyle and the results of our work. Doyle had chosen all the top experts at that time.” Caro has since produced a number of his own. “I think there are seven under my name and probably about 50 if you count the help I’ve given other people with their own books.”

The next under his name, Professional Hold ‘em - Play By Play, is due out by the end of the year. Nothing, however, appears to have received ore attention than Mike Caro’s University of Poker.

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