Reacting to community cards

It happened again today. I was in a tournament at the Hilton. I wasn't in the hand, but the flop came down 2-5-2, and immediately another player who had folded before the flop smacked his hand down on the table, groaned, and shook his head. It was obvious to everybody that he had folded a deuce. (He later claimed to have folded 5-2, in fact, which is perfectly plausible.)

I hate this sort of thing. There's absolutely no reason for it. It's highly unethical, for exactly the same reason that you can't say out loud, in that situation, "I folded a deuce." That provides potentially crucial information to the players still making decisions--information to which they are not entitled. Suppose you're trying to represent having hit trips on that flop, and a player announces that he folded a deuce. Your bluff just became a whole lot harder to sell. Or suppose that you do, in fact, have a deuce with a weak kicker, and your dilemma is figuring out whether your opponent has the last deuce in the deck with a better kicker. Hearing that the last deuce was folded would be a big help to you, and, conversely, would hurt your opponent (because he will be less likely to believe that you have a deuce now, and because you'll be able to play the hand much more strongly than you would if you were worried about being up against a better set of trips). Such situations are exactly why it's explicitly against the rules to say such a thing. Well, an overt negative reaction to the flop essentially announces the same thing.

Unfortunately, it's highly problematic to try to write or enforce a rule against non-verbal actions such as this, because they can be as dramatic as this guy today was, or as subtle as rolling one's eyes silently, which one would have to be very observant to notice. But whether or not it's technically forbidden and subject to penalty in the same way that a verbal announcement would be, it's just wrong.

When I've pointed this out to offending players in the past, I sometimes get the protest along the lines of "I can't help it--it's involuntary." Bullshit. It's completely under your control. If you were still in the hand, would you yield to your impulse to stand up and cheer for having flopped a full house? No, of course not. You'd suppress it to the very best of your ability. You can do exactly the same kind of suppression of your natural reaction when that reaction is negative, if you choose to do so. If you react overtly, it's because you are making a deliberate decision to conduct yourself in that manner. No excuses.

Moreover, the not-s0-subtle psychological reason for people wanting to act out like this is that they want sympathy from other players about what a great opportunity they missed. But the fact is, nobody cares what a great hand you might have made. (On this subject, see my very first blog post: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2006/10/what-you-threw-away.html.) You're not going to get any sympathy (or, at best, you'll get some phony imitation of sympathy, though it's beyond me why anybody would reward your actions with even this). The same thing happens to everybody from time to time, and it's just part of the game. It's unavoidable, unless you literally play every hand you're dealt.

Deal with it. Grow up. Get over yourself. Stop acting like a baby, and stop throwing your little tantrums. They're immature, annoying, pointless, repulsively self-centered, unethical, and they disrupt the game.

Addendum, October 12, 2007

Last night I was re-watching one of the first-season installments of GSN's "High Stakes Poker." In one hand, Doyle Brunson folds pocket 8s to a bet on the flop when he doesn't hit a set. Two others are still in the hand. What would have been his third 8 comes on the turn--and it would have been the winning hand. Doyle immediately grimaces, shakes his head, and turns to look at somebody standing near him. It wasn't as flagrant as the instance I wrote about above, but it would have been perfectly obvious to anybody at the table that was looking his way at the moment. Of all the people that should know better than to act that way--Doyle Brunson?! So if you do this yourself, you're in good company, in a sense--but it's still wrong.