Nowadays, everyone who hits the TV set is a poker celebrity. If you score a decent result on TV, set up a Web site and write a blog, you can call yourself a pro, get an agent and try to profit from that designation. Self-branding is the new poker beyond poker, which is why Mike Caro's relative disappearance from the poker scene makes for some wonderful irony.
On Tuesday, ESPN will air the first episode of its main-event coverage from the 2009 World Series of Poker, and Caro -- the 65-year-old master of tells, stud and human psychology -- will be featured after a four-year absence from poker's limelight. A man who once was known for the fervor with which he sought the spotlight, Caro tired of its constant exposure, but time away has left him excited for more.
"I always like [the exposure]," said Caro, best known for his timeless "Caro's Book of Poker Tells." "I can remember the first time I was written up. It was a thrill to me. Now, I don't see most articles written about me. Someone tells me they saw something about it, and I don't even realize it any more. I like it, though; I wish I had copies of everything.
"Like everything else, when you first get exposure, you crave more, but you come to understand that past a certain point, it doesn't help you any more. Now, though, I've been a hermit for four years. This is Mike Caro coming back. In that sense, I'm excited to see the show."
Decades before modern poker time began (around the 2003 WSOP), Caro was one of the original successful poker brands. "The Mad Genius of Poker" was a self-chosen moniker.
"You can blame the Mad Genius persona on Doyle Brunson," said Caro, whom Brunson hand-picked as one of the original collaborators on "Super System," poker's equivalent of the Bible. "In the first 'Super System,' Doyle did a short bio about me and called me 'Crazy Mike.' No one called me that, but Doyle thought it was my nickname. I hated it. A few people had called me a genius after extravagant plays. In my next interview, I told them I was the Mad Genius, which I'm more comfortable with."
The nickname served two primary purposes: branding, and creating a false image at the table.
"Yes, I did try to brand that," Caro said. "I realized that I was going to get my poker messages out better with that persona. It wasn't just marketing; the persona was profitable for poker playing, too. It gave me a psychological edge by being friendly and bizarre. It leads to more profit. As soon as I hit the floor, I transform. I become the Mad Genius. Everyone in life has different personas in different areas of their life. People are chameleons, fitting differently into different groups they're around. One vey large truth is that when I'm at a table or a seminar, I'm the Mad Genius. When I'm in a business meeting, I'm a different Mike Caro. I'm a chameleon, too."
That Caro was ahead of his time as branding goes should hardly be a surprise, given his past. A professional player since the 1960s, Caro went against the conventional wisdom of keeping one's cards close to the vest when Brunson selected him to write the draw poker section of "Super System."
"I think he gets his credit," Brunson said of Caro, who also contributed some 50 statistical tables to the tome. "He probably doesn't get the credit he should as a poker player, though. He's extremely good. He just hasn't gotten much exposure in the last few years."
"I came into 'Super System' kicking and screaming," said Caro, who now works with Brunson on DoylesRoom. "I didn't want to do it. I was dead set against it. I didn't believe it would be profitable for me to share my secrets and didn't want to do it. Doyle wanted to do it, though, and was very persuasive. We worked for months and months. Poker became an obsession. I've wondered why I didn't put the energy into something else in life. I just can't help it; I think about all sorts of things. Poker was my obsession, so I thought about it the most.
"When 'Super System' came out, something changed with me. Players from around the world were writing me, thankful to have actual, valid, analyzed, thoroughly accurate information for the first time. It occurred to me that poker is one of the most complex games, maybe the most. It had the stature of chess or bridge and hadn't been brought to the public with the kind of scrutiny those games had. That was the start of my lifelong quest to educate the world about poker. Blame it on Doyle Brunson."
In the years that followed, Caro followed that flame with vigor. He became one of poker's best known writers along with Brunson and David Sklansky, writing regularly for Gambling Times magazine and authoring a plethora of books. Eventually, he branched out into seminars, taking advantage of video technology to reach the masses, and he was among the first professionals to endorse an online casino, Planet Poker back in 1997.
Caro's absence these past four years was due partially to geography, partially to his poker specialties.
"I never played many tournaments," Caro said from his home in the Ozarks. "I was never a tournament player. I'm going to start playing the circuit in a year or two once I get my present projects done. Tournaments to me are no way to prove who's best. There are too many people competing, and the one thing I dislike about tournaments is that first place is penalized. If they win all the chips and only get a percentage of the prize pool, that's a penalty. This means, mathematically, that you have to play to survive. All of my research goes out the window in a tournament because you can't take profitable risks."
Despite that attitude, he still plays at the WSOP. He wanders the Rio hallways amazed at how the game has changed. He remarks on the prestige it carries now when it once didn't. As one of the men who helped cater the game to that kind of respectability, he takes pride in how the players of the game have changed.
"I think serious players have an investment in the game now," he said, as if his relationship with poker hadn't been encapsulated that way for the past four decades. "It's something they cherish, and they don't want to see it corrupted. People are intolerant now of the old behavior. They stand up to protect what we have now."
So tune in to ESPN at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday, and you'll have an opportunity to see one of the old protectors take a shot at the most prestigious tournament in new poker. Regardless of how he fares, he'll leave his imprint branded on your brain. That's part of being the Mad Genius. That's part of the WSOP.
Gary Wise is a poker columnist for ESPN.com.