"I had to call you"

I haven't yet compiled a list of the Ten Stupidest Things That Poker Players Say All the Time, but a leading candidate for such a list would be "I had to call you."

It seems that this is said with about equal frequency by players who win pots with a call and those who lose pots with a call. It doesn't matter--it's just as stupid either way.

First of all, no, you never have to call any bet. There is no gun being held to your temple. There is no rule requiring it. You get to choose. Now, it may be that in a given situation it is mathematically correct (i.e., a positive expected value over the long haul of making that decision many times in a lifetime of playing) to call, but that is not the same thing as saying that you had to call.

Secondly, it isn't even true that the call in question was reasonable on an EV basis many of the times that somebody utters the dreaded words. If there are 4 parts of a royal flush on the board, and you call a river bet to somebody who, by all indications, does indeed have either the straight or the flush, and you say, "I had to call you--I had top pair," well, then, you're an idiot.

In fact, this is one of the basic problems with the phrase: it is often followed by a statement about what the player was holding, e.g., "I had to call you, I had 2 pair/trips/a straight" (or whatever). But this just reveals that the person is making his decisions based solely on the strength of his own hand, rather than the relative strength of his hand versus that of the opponent--a preposterous way to make poker decisions. You don't get the pot just because you flopped a set or caught a straight on the turn. This ain't video poker, where the reward depends only on the hand you make. Whether your call wins you the pot because you beat a bluff or an unexpectedly weaker hand, or loses you money because your opponent had a stronger hand, making the call based only on what you're holding misses the entire point of good poker decision-making.

Finally, nobody at the table--least of all the guy who you either just beat or just gave more money to--gives a shit why you made the decision you did. Let me repeat, a little bit louder: NOBODY CARES WHY YOU MADE THE CALL! (And it's usually obvious without your explanation anyway, if anyone bothers to analyze the situation.) If you won, you're certainly not going to take the sting of the loss away from the other guy by saying, "I had to call, I had two pairs." In fact, it's rude and unsportsmanlike to rub it in with a speech. If you lost, the guy raking in your money absolutely doesn't give a damn why you made your mistake; he's just wondering if he maybe should have bet more and sucked more chips his way. So you're pissing in the wind with your post-hand analysis. Nobody is listening to you. Nobody cares.

Furthermore, your explanation just reveals a pathological insecurity: you are so afraid of what people will think of your call that you feel a need to explain it. But why on earth would you care what the other players think? If it was a reasonable call, given the range of hands with which your opponent made his bet, and it turned out that he was actually at the high end of that range with one of the few hands that would beat you, then be content with your own analysis that it was the right move. If you correctly sniffed out a bluff or a hand that was otherwise weaker than the bet represented, great, be proud of yourself.

Either way, what is the point of trying to change what somebody else might think of your call by providing an explanation of it? If somebody is impressed with a good call, they won't be made more so by your little self-centered explanation. And if somebody is inclined to think you made a bad call (regardless of the results), so what? Let them think you're a calling station or a moron, and then figure out a way to exploit that erroneous impression (if, in fact, it is erroneous). What's more, consider this: If it was actually a bad call, your justification of it after the fact just makes you look that much dumber in the eyes of experienced players, and they will go out of their way to set you up to make the same mistake again, to their benefit.

In my experience, I often have to think for quite a long time after a hand is over before making a really good assessment of whether a call was smart or not. Your instant analysis is at least as likely to be wrong as it is to be right.

So the next time you feel an urge to say "I had to call you," please just stifle it. It's never true, it's often not even an approximation of the truth, it tends to reveal only bad things about you, and, most of all, nobody cares.