The Jim Rose Circus: And How to Win $28.64 an Hour at Poker

Jim, what’s this heads up challenge you’ve been doing in Australia?

I issued a challenge to Michael Kandanski, a well-known movie and music producer in Australia, and maybe the biggest tour promoter out there. We were originally going to play heads up to decide whether I was going to be paid two million dollars to do the tour in November or whether I would do it for free, but the casino stepped in and said, “That’s not really the way we do things. This sounds a little bit like a tournament, but you’re changing the rules.” We only found out that it wasn’t acceptable a couple of before hours we were to play, so we changed it to whoever lost had to smash their hand with a can of soup.

And you lost?

Er, yeah I lost.

This guy was trained by the world champion, Joe Hachem, wasn’t he?

Yeah, Joe’s a great guy. I live in Las Vegas and I play poker professionally, and I’m a cash game player – I don’t get involved with tournaments. But the WSOP crown leaving the U.S. was a very sad day. We take poker pretty serious in America.

Anyway, I digress. Michael was trained by Joe. Joe and I are friends, so afterwards he told me what he’d told Michael. Joe explained to him premium hands with a bit of a conservative take on it. My mistake was going at him heads up, prior to the official contest. Obviously, heads up, if you wait for premium cards, you blind away, so I was beating him like a rented mule, and I believe that because I had smacked him around so much beforehand, he changed gears for the
real contest. And that kind of threw me. It was only about a seven-minute game. I ended up with K-9 suited and went all in and he called me with a K-J.

You’re known for your wild and crazy stunts. Do you make a lot of bets where you have to do something dangerous if you lose?

Not so much anymore, but in Las Vegas when I play tourists – which is what I mostly do (there’s usually two or three pros at the table and the rest are tourists) – I’ll say something like, “If you don’t call me, I’ll shove a spoon in my face!” Or, “If you do call me, I’ll snap a mousetrap on my tongue.” Then they get distracted by that and forget about the money and start worrying about the mousetrap. I carry a mousetrap in my pocket when I go to the casino for that very reason.

So being a performer helps with your game?

Yeah, and it also allows me access to playing other performers. I beat Ben Affleck a while ago, Tobey Maguire, Macaulay Culkin… Affleck and Maguire have gotten really good. But I remember when they were the seafood buffet; they were just total fish.

You’re actually a professional player for seven months of the year?

I play poker for seven months, I fish and golf for a month and then I take my circus on tour for four. This is the golfing and fishing month. It’s beautiful.

So tell us about your upcoming tour, what sort of stunts can we expect?

Not much that you can print! I got the world’s fattest contortionist – 270 kilos of elasticity. I’ve got a porn star, Amber Pie; she’ll be proving she’s a sex artist. She’ll be throwing hundreds of condoms into the audience, and whoever gets the blue one gets half-an-hour with her after the show. We’re also having battle of the sexes. Mr Lifto attaches a chain to a certain part of his anatomy and the other side of the chain is attached to Amber Pie’s…er… lady parts, and they have a tug-of-war. I got a guy who swallows a Rubik’s cube and regurgitates it with the puzzle solved. Oh, and there’s a guy who balances a running lawnmower on his upper lip and we give
the audience heads of lettuce. They throw them at him and we turn the stage into salad.

Where do you meet these people, Jim?

I meet these people all over the place. Wherever I go, like-minded monsters sit up in their crypts and come to audition.

Tell us about how you first started performing?

My father was a poker pro, but it was back in the day when you were driving around from city to city. When I was a kid I would be in the car with him the whole summer and he would drive around playing cash games, so I got that wanderlust in me. We settled down in about 1973 and I got a job working at the state fairground in Phoenix, AZ. In those days, the state fair was a cultural hub of the weird and wonderful: rock bands would play there, circuses, theater companies (I was actually Nicely Johnson in Guys and Dolls for two seasons), freak shows, motorcycle daredevils, monster-trucks and professional wrestlers – all of that stuff ended up at your state fairground. My first job was as a motorcycle daredevil; I attempted to jump 27 cows, and I cleared the cows but must’ve landed on some spent cud, and that’s why today I’ve got the posture of a jumbo shrimp. That’s the most dangerous stunt I’ve ever done. I feel it every time I take a step – every time I wake up, I remember those cows. I got a political science degree from The University of Arizona (which is quite normal), but poker kept drawing me back. So about 12 years ago I started playing poker again under my father’s tutelage, and that started working out.

Tell us about this system you’ve come up with.

I worked on this game theory, just for kicks. I worked out a guaranteed way to win $28 an hour in Vegas, which is a decent living for a lot of people, but it doesn’t really interest me much. But I needed to see if it would work.

There are so many maniacs at the casino. A lot of people watch TV and think they have figured out poker because they’ve watched it for an hour. They don’t realize it’s 12 hours of shooting and they’ve edited it down to an hour. All you see is bluffs gone bad and maniac moves that go well – and that’s not real poker.

So I worked it out with millions of simulations on the computer and then went and did it for a seven month period, five days a week, and it came out at $28.64 an hour. Here’s how it works. You play the low blind games. I would say the best ones to play are the $2/$5 games. In a low blind game, a bunch of chips is not strength, it’s vulnerability – unless you’re one of the best players around (and if you’re one of the best players around you wouldn’t be playing the $2/$5 games!). Too many people want to look at a flop and anybody playing the $2/$5 has only a certain level of ability. That means that their big chip stack in front of them, if they stay there long enough, is gonna get sucked out from under them.

What is the only move a pro would make if he was on a short stack? He would go all-in if he had A-A, K-K, Q-Q or A-K. So I’ve simplified the game down to one move, because that is the move the best pro in the world would make.

So, you buy in for $140 – let everyone else have the big stacks. You sit there and wait for one of those four hands. If you’ve got a maniac to your left, you limp in and let him raise it and go all-in when it comes back to you. You’re going to see one of those combos on average once in about 43 or 44 hands. So, say you’ve blinded down to about $120. If no one calls you when you go all in, you’ll have probably picked up about forty dollars. So now you’re at $160. Then you’ll blind down another $20 or so (your original buy-in), before you get a shot at it again. If someone does call you the first time, and you win, you’re at about $240 and you’re $100 ahead, so you cash out and put your name back on the list, or walk across the street to another casino and do the same thing.

It’s just money management. You cash out and buy back in for $140 and do the same thing again. It’s foolproof. It’s chump bait, because if you’re down to $140 and there are all these big stacks, and there’s already $60 in the pot, someone’s going to call you with a KJ suited or whatever.

Chris “Jesus” Ferguson – who’s a good friend of mine – took a dollar and turned it into $20,000 over a five-month period using my system – just for a lark in his spare time. Isn’t that funny? They’re a little tighter online than they are in Vegas, so what you want to do is play four screens at the same time, each with sixty dollars. Doing that will actually make you more money. That comes to $37 per hour and some change.

Tell us about the book you’ve got out.

It’s called Snake Oil. Everyone talks about a street education; they say, that guy’s got ‘street smarts’. Well what does that mean? If you don’t have that knowledge, then it’s probably not very clear to you. And to get that sort of knowledge you have to go through a lot of hard knocks. So I decided to write a book that eliminated the hard knocks. When you’ve finished reading Snake Oil, you get it. How to never pay for a beer again in your life; all kinds of bar bets; how pimps turn girls into prostitutes; mind control; brainwashing; hypnotism; how to do all the circus and carnival and freak show scams and stunts; how Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear; how David Blaine levitates – he’s not supernatural, how does he do it? How to be dropped off in any city anywhere in the world with no money and not speak the language and survive. It’s an underground survival guide. Go to amazon.com, or jimrosecircus.com to get hold of it.