The drunk cop

Here's a story from last October that I wrote up and emailed to a friend.

At the Hilton today there was a guy that, by coincidence, had been at my table at the Orleans last night. He’s terrible as a poker player. He didn’t seem too drunk last night, but this afternoon he was reeking and reeling, and barely coherent. Because he recognized me, he acted as if we were best friends, particularly since the only open seat was on his immediate right. While I was trying to focus on the game, he kept trying to engage me in conversation about work, about sports, about blackjack, whatever. At one point he nudges me and shows me a badge—he’s a cop from Tulsa, Oklahoma. I have no idea why he thought that I would be impressed.

Anyway, I’m in the small blind with Q-8, a pretty worthless hand, but nobody raises, so I toss in the extra $1 to see the flop—and it has two more 8s in it! There are no straight or flush draws possible, so I can safely slow-play it. I check, somebody bets $5, which several people call, building the pot nicely. I’m salivating.

Turn card is another blank, but it’s the second of one of the suits, so I think I’d better take the pot on this round of betting rather than risk somebody catching a flush on the river. Still, I’m first to act, and confident that somebody will bet at it and I can raise, so I start off just checking. Drunk Cop surprises me by betting $15. It gets folded around to an Asian guy two seats to my right, who is sitting behind several hundred dollars in chips. He looks at Drunk Cop and says, “I’ll put you all in,” which means that he’s raising—betting whatever amount Drunk Cop has in front of him. The dealer counts D.C.’s chips, and it’s $59, so Asian Guy pushes out $59. I can barely keep from slobbering. “I’m all-in,” I say. D.C. looks at me as if I’ve just insulted him or something, but he pushes all his chips in. Asian Guy clearly doesn’t like this development—he had obviously assumed that his big raise would push everybody else out and it would be just him vs. D.C. But he calls my all-in reraise. We show our hands, and Asian guy has 2 pairs. D.C. has the last 8, but only a deuce kicker versus my queen kicker. The river card doesn’t change anything, and I take down the whole stinkin’ pot. It’s the kind of hand that I wait hours for, and makes all the difference in whether it’s a winning or losing day.

But the weird thing is that after it’s all over, D.C. starts whining to me about what I did. “Come on, you know I’m a cop, you know I don’t make much money. You didn’t have to play it that hard. You could have gone just a little easy on me.” He is dead serious. And he keeps it up. “Why did you have to do that? You make enough as it is. [I have no idea how he thinks he knows what my income is.] I can’t afford to be losing this much.”

Well tough cookies, dude. Excuse me, but weren’t *you* trying to take *my* money with your bet? What in the hell is unfair about me turning the tables on you? You took a chance, I took a chance. You might have had 8-K and beaten my 8-Q, or you might have had a full house instead of just trips. I knew that, and gambled that I was ahead, and I was right. You thought you were ahead, and you were wrong. How in the hell does that make me the bad guy here? And what am I supposed to do—check every player’s 1040 forms before deciding how hard to try to play against him? Ask whether he can really afford to be playing poker? Bite me, you weirdo! What an idiot.

Of course, I don’t say any of that. I just say, “Hey, it’s a game. I try to play it the best I can. I’m not trying to hurt you, you just got stuck with a hand that was second-best. I’m sure you wouldn’t have folded if you had been in my position. And if you had turned out to have the best hand, I’d have said, ‘Nice hand,’ and moved on.” I am intensely conscious *not* to apologize in any manner. Fortunately, right about then another seat opened up, and I moved away from him. Later, I caught the dealer on a break and asked if she had overheard that. She said, “Oh yeah, the guy playing the sympathy card? That was seriously weird. I wonder if he expected you to give his money back or something.” Who knows?