Monkey Management

[ The following article appeared in Card Player Magazine ]

Monkey Management
  by Perry Friedman

In the May 10th Card Player, Daniel Negreanu discusses the merits of
Pot-Limit vs No-Limit hold'em for the main event at the World Series of
Poker.  While Daniel makes many good points in his article, I have
to vehemently disagree with one of them.  Daniel states that there
are certain people, who he terms "move-in specialists", that
have a system for preflop play that is very difficult to beat.  He
says that Chris Ferguson utilized this system to win the main event.
So far, no disagreement here.  However, he states in the article
"It's likely you could develop a winning preflop strategy and have a
monkey execute it."  While Daniel explicitly states that he is not
saying "Chris is a monkey", he does imply that a monkey could be
taught to play as well as Chris.

Now, I know Chris, and I've played with Chris, and Chris is no monkey.
Further, I don't think a monkey could be taught to play as well as
Chris --  I think it would take at least a chimpanzee, or perhaps an
orangutan.  I just don't think a lower primate could be trained to
play well enough.  I firmly believe you would need one of the great
apes.  Perhaps a gorilla could play like Chris, but only a
female.  Male gorillas have a hard time controlling their aggression
and emotion, so male gorillas could only be trained to play like former
World Champion Phil Hellmuth, Jr.

The problem with training a monkey to play no-limit poker well enough
to win the main event is that monkeys and other lower primates lack
the patience and focus to perform well for hours on end, let alone
over several days.  However, I have trained a monkey to sit in front
of my computer and play single table tournaments online, and he has
done quite well.  Ah, the beauty of online poker - on the Internet, no
one knows you're a monkey.

I do believe that with great patience and effort I could train my
monkey to win a super satellite at the World Series of Poker.  I also
have no doubt that he would be dead money in the main event.  After a
few hours, he'd be flinging feces and jumping out of his chair.

I'm sorry, I'm thinking of Phil again.

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