"Nice bet"

It seems I'm hearing this more and more these days. It's almost always the same situation: one player makes a big bet, everybody else folds, and then either one of the players who folded or somebody who wasn't even in the hand says "Nice bet."

This is completely inane. Nobody except the person making the bet can evaluate whether it was a good bet or not, because nobody else knows what the goal or intent of the bet was.

In one of the ESPN episodes covering the World Series of Poker, they showed Daniel Negreanu in a hand. He bet, opponent folded, and somebody said, "Nice bet." DN looked a little disgusted and said something like, "No, it wasn't--if I had made a nice bet, he would have called."

I wanted to cheer. He gets it--most people don't.

If I have the nuts, I obviously want a call. I want to bet the largest amount that an opponent will call. It's usually difficult to know what that magic number is. Only if you hit it, or pretty close to it, can the bet be considered "nice," and unless it's an all-in bet that gets called, or the opponent later tells you that you bet the most that he would have called, you'll never know whether you got maximum return or not. If he folds when you were hoping for a call, you blew it.

A bet is not "nice" or smart or any other positive adjective unless it accomplishes what it was intended to do. And even then, it can only be considered "nice" if the goal was a good one. Lots of bad players hugely overbet a pot on the flop when they have, e.g., an overpair, to make it ridiculously expensive for anybody to go for a straight draw or flush draw. That's not smart play. Yes, you want to give opponents incorrect pot odds to draw to a hand that will beat yours, but you also don't want to put at risk more chips than it takes to accomplish this. If the pot has $20 in it, and somebody bets $200 at it, and everybody folds, it just plain was not a "nice bet"; yes, it did what the player wanted, but it was still really dumb. So dammit, don't tell him it was a "nice bet"! (Of course, you also don't want to point out how stupid it was--but I'll deal with tapping on the aquarium in a rant another day.)

In short, it's virtually impossible for anybody else at the table to know whether a bet was good or not (with the rare exception of when the hand is shown down, and it can be seen in retrospect that the bet fulfilled the goal of getting a worse hand to call for an amount that was obviously painful and difficult for the caller to put in). I hate meaningless, insincere, or wrongheaded compliments, and "nice bet" is nearly always fits at least one of those descriptors.

So just knock it off, OK?