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Many poker enthusiasts think of Mike "The Mouth" Matusow as the weird uncle of the poker world. He's never in contention when we talk about the best players in the game and he's never praised for the high quality of his betting patterns.
Mike's tendency to trash talk is just about the only thing most people bring up when talking about his game. However, Matusow managed to accumulate some impressive results over the years including four World Series of Poker bracelets and he managed to stay relevant in the poker world despite many personal issues.
In this article, we'll take a closer look at some of the famous hands involving Mike and try to figure out what makes his game tick.
"The Mouth"
Mike Matusow didn't get his nickname by accident. "The Mouth" has this amazing talent of making everyone else at the table feel uncomfortable or too comfortable (unfortunately for the players and fortunately for the viewers it's usually the former rather than the latter). In the hand against Eric Seidel, Matusow actually showed us some pretty solid poker.
He correctly recognized that given the coordinated board texture Seidel won't cbet the board with nearly wide enough of a range to justify the check/call or check/raise play so he decided to lead into the preflop raiser despite his range advantage. Mike's reaction after he receives a bad beat surely made everyone else a bit uneasy. Most poker players are used to the quiet, static reality of live poker.
This hand played against Gus Hansen might not be very interesting if we focus on betting patterns alone, but if there ever was a good example of adding insult to injury at the poker table Mike Matusow dancing with his toy donkey after giving Hansen a bad beat has to be one of the top contenders.
It's important to remember that while there are some general rules regarding the optimal poker mindset and following them would benefit the vast majority of the player population some outliers can get away with breaking said rules and trying to gain advantage doing something that wouldn't be advisable for others (like trying to needle your opponent after a bad beat by dancing with a toy donkey) - Mike Matusow is one of the best examples of similar behavior in action.
Aggression in Small Pots
You can't really hope to stick around for long in the world of high stakes poker without getting aggressive in spots that other people tend to ignore. Five to ten years ago most players were perfectly happy giving up on thelimped pots even in the context of the high-stakes televised poker.
This spot clearly shows that Mike was ahead of his time and he realized that small and medium pots might be even more important to the player's overall success than the big pots that are often just manifestations of the variance in action. In this particular hand against Daniel Negreanu, "The Mouth" realized that his A-high doesn't really have that much value multiway and lead bet might be a much better idea.
Turn and River bring practically the best cards in the deck for Mike to continue his aggression especially given the fact that he had an Ace in his hand and while it's debatable if hero calling the river raise from Negreanu is a good idea, on the whole, his line made a lot of sense and was somewhat unusual when we account for the trends in poker strategy popular at the time.
You Live by The Sword
In this hand, Mike Matusow used Phil Hellmuth's favorite play and "trapped" him. While the attempts of Phil Hellmuth at "trapping" other players often seem arbitrary and mistimed, Matusow simply played his hand in a manner that would've been perfectly viable on a tough table in 2016 assuming similar situation with aggressive players sitting behind him.
While preflop raise might still be correct (especially if Farha wasn't lying about his range consisting of any two cards) limping the pocket pair behind is a good line if Mike expects his opponents to 3bet his iso-raise often.
Postflop the hand practically plays itself and once again we get this signature inappropriate behavior from Mike after the hand ends aimed at tilting the opponent (and in the case of Phil Hellmuth tilt was all but guaranteed).
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