Gotcha. That's where we are different. I'm also good at selecting players who are not jerks. I'm not at all good at dealing with jerks. Well, I come out ok, in that I know that with my personality, I'm merely going to make them madder if I try to deal with them. So I don't, and then I move on without worrying about it. But they don't get anything particularly useful out of the exchange. I deal with jerks by ... refusing to deal with them.
I should probably be more clear that I have only ever dealt with jerks at one-shot games at Cons or the game store and even then only very rarely. I of course would exclude any jerks from an ongoing game.
One thing I've found is that some jerks can be dealt with by harnessing their jerk powers for the forces of Good.
There was this one guy who used to come to the NC Game Days and always wanted to play in my games (hey, who can blame him? I run fun games!). His problem was that he was into gaming for the big explosions. The bigger the explosion and the more of them there were, the happier he was. He would frequently attempt to hijack the scene and try to guide it toward a big explosion.
My way of dealing with him was to quickly shut him down if he tried to hijack a non-explosion-focused scene for the purposes of exploding it. But then I'd let him run wild in an explosion frenzy when such scenes were appropriate. Meanwhile, everybody else at the table could basically try and come up with ways to let this guy get himself killed. They got the visceral joy of maneuvering the explosion guy into getting himself killed and he certainly brought some energy to the scenes where there was the blowing up of stuff.
I will note that other groups were less generous with this guy. I heard one story of a game where they were about to enter a room with a Vampire and the plan was for everybody to hold their action until the Cleric got a chance to do some anti-Vampire thing (turn undead or throw holy water or something like that). The Explosion Guy won initiative and charged into the room. On the Cleric's turn he shut the door behind Explosion Guy's character and the entire rest of the party calmly waited outside while Explosion Guy's character was very quickly killed by the Vampire. Then, after the screams had died out, the party entered the room, executed their original plan, and defeated the Vampire.
Explosion Guy kept asking, "Can I come back as an undead?"
GM said, "Nope."
I'm a little fuzzy as to whether the Explosion Guy asked, "Why not?" GM would probably have said, "I don't like you."
