Most poker players gain their fame through playing the game first, and then some branch out into writing books and other materials on the subject. Mike Caro is certainly one exception to this rule though, as he is definitely more noted for his theories and strategic opinions on the game rather than his playing accomplishments.

Mike Caro was born in 1944 and no one would have ever guessed that he would grow up to be an authority in any kind of field. In fact, administrators and teachers at Mike’s elementary school thought that he might have a major learning disability. By Caro’s own account during an interview he said, “I was held back in the 6th grade and put in a special retarded class because people thought that there was something wrong with me.”

Luckily it didn’t take long before his teachers realized the mistake that they had made and pulled him out of the special needs class and put him instead in an accelerated learning class. Caro’s accelerated learning powered him through school and into a job as a sports editor with a paper in Gardena, California. However, the editing world didn’t pay too well; Caro began looking for employment elsewhere and found it eventually in the poker world.

Mike began playing for a living around the L.A. area but he didn’t feel as if he were reaching his full potential so he began looking for strategy books that would help him improve his game. But this was during the early 70’s and there were very few poker books out there at the time. The ones that did exist were simply overviews or instructions on how to play different forms of poker. So Caro set out to develop his own strategies and mathematics for the game. 

Eventually, the theories and mathematics that Caro was developing for the game caught the attention of poker legend Doyle Brunson, who was especially interested in Caro’s knowledge of Draw Poker and asked him to do some work on his book called Doyle Brunson’s Super System. Mike accepted his offer and not only wrote a chapter on Draw Poker for the book but also contributed numerous statistical tables as well. Thus Mike Caro the poker expert was born. 

People began to look at Mike Caro as a true pioneer, since statistics for poker were very rare at the time. And as his reputation grew so did his list of works, which included one of the top poker books of the 80s:Mike Caro’s Book of Poker Tells. Books weren’t the only thing that Caro was working on during the 80’s though, as he also used his computer to create a poker program called Orac (Caro spelled backwards.) This was a first, since no one had really dabbled in poker artificial intelligence at this point.

With news of Orac, Caro began to branch out even further as he began editing and writing for magazines like Gambling Times and Card Player Magazine, held poker seminars across the world, and became the manager of the Huntington Park Casino for a short time. In 1992, Mike was the catalyst behind the first corporate sponsored poker tourney in the World Poker Finals. 

Not too long after this, Mike Caro jumped into the world of online poker as he was involved with a room called Poker Planet in the late 90s. Nowadays, he is still involved with online poker at Doyle’s Room and continues to write articles and books on strategy for the game. For his body of work within the poker community, he has been dubbed the “Mad Genius”.

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