"That guy didn't bet his full house!"

Last story from tonight's session at the Rio.

I'm in the small blind of a $1-$3 no-limit hold'em game. I have a J-2, an awful, despicable hand. But about five other players limp in ahead of me, so the pot odds are probably right to throw another $2 at this trash in the hopes of hitting something juicy, like two pairs. The big blind checks behind me.

The flop is Q-Q-J. Yuck. It gets checked all around. Everybody who doesn't have a queen in his hand is suspicious that somebody else does have one and is lurking like a snake in the grass, waiting for somebody else to bet, so he can pounce on it with a raise.

The turn card is another jack. This is interesting, because now I have a full house, jacks full of queens. But, of course, I'm crushed if anybody was, in fact, slow-playing a queen, because he would now have queens full of jacks. Nevertheless, there's a decent chance that nobody is sitting on a queen. So I bet $10. I get called by the guy two seats to my right (in the cutoff seat).

At this point, I naturally assume that he has either a queen or a jack, and I see no point in wasting any more money on this hand. The river card is a meaningless brick. I check, and my last remaining opponent checks behind me. He has A-4, giving him the two pair on the board with an ace kicker.

Before he sees my cards, he says, "We must be chopping it up." In other words, he concluded that I must have an ace, too. When he sees my full house, his eyes bug out. "You didn't bet that????" (Yes, there were actually four question marks in his voice. Precisely. I counted them.) He laughed, and then I heard him turning to the people on his right, and he said to them, "That guy didn't bet his full house!" To him, it was abdunantly clear that I was the dumbest poker player the world had ever produced. He added, though, "I guess it doesn't matter--I wouldn't have called another bet anyway."

I don't give poker lessons at the table, but I don't mind giving them to my faithful readers. (I'm confident that many readers will already understand the logic behind checking instead of betting there, but surely this will be a new concept to at least some.)

Betting on the river would be a classic example of what is technically known as a "zero-equity bet." Putting it more colloquially, it is commonly said that in that situation, "You'll only get called if you're beat."

My oh-so-knowledgeable opponent appears to have had at least a glimmer of insight into this, when he said that he wouldn't have called another bet on the river. Presumably, he would correctly interpret such a bet to mean that I had either a jack or a queen, and from his point of view it wouldn't matter whether I had the big full house or the little one, because he would lose either way if he called.

If my opponent had a jack, then he would probably call, and we would just split the pot, meaning that the river bet gained me no profit. If, though, he had a queen, he would raise, and I would be forced to either fold, thus wasting whatever I had bet, or make a bad call, and lose even more.

The only way I make money with a bet on the end there is if I'm up against a complete novice (or drunk) who has absolutely no clue what he's doing, or, possibly, a timid player who would fold a jack. But it's far more likely that my opponent has a queen than that either of these scenarios is happening. In other words, if I bet there every time over the course of 100 such situations, I will lose that bet to a guy with a queen more times than I will get called by a guy with no full house, or win the whole pot (rather than splitting it) from a guy with a jack. In the long run, betting at that point costs me money. It gains me nothing.

There are only two reasons to bet in poker after all the cards have been dealt out: To get a weaker hand to call, and to get a stronger hand to fold. There are no other useful goals for betting the river (assuming that you're playing in order to make money, rather than for reasons of ego, etc.). In the situation described, there is no hand stronger than my full house that will fold, and no hand weaker than mine that will call, assuming that the opponent is not a blithering idiot.

But the guy at the table tonight can't think that deeply about the game. He's what we call a "level one" player, focused only on what the cards are. To him, the logic is this: "I have a full house! That's a great hand! I'm going to bet!" The analysis stops there.

At the risk of sounding self-absorbed, it is very, very good for me that the poker rooms of this city teem with players whose thinking is that shallow. They keep my bills paid. At the same time, though, it's a little sad that there are so many people who put so little thought into a game that so richly rewards deep pondering with both intellectual satifsaction and monetary gains. (Not that this particular concept is really deep. It's not quite Poker 101, but thinking about why one should or should not bet in a given spot is certainly not much further along than, say, Poker 201.)