"If it makes you feel any better..."

Harrah's tonight. I'm one of several players starting up a new $1-$2 NLHE table. Maybe 15 minutes in, I'm on the button and see the two black queens. (This is the hand I refer to as "the nappy-headed hos"; see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/04/new-name-for-poker-hand.html.) The under-the-gun player has put in a small raise, to $7, and picked up two callers, so I decide to reraise to either win the pot now or isolate one opponent. I bump it up to $25 and get called in two spots, the original raiser and one other.

The flop is all spades, all lower than my queens. The action is check-checked to me. I have only about $65 left in front of me, so it's a no-brainer to push all-in. The original raiser calls, while the other guy folds.

My opponent sees my queens, then turns over the king of spades and the king of hearts. I can't even win by hitting my flush! A fourth spade comes on the turn, and I'm toast. Rebuy!

OK, nothing too remarkable about this hand. I had two decisions to make, and would do them exactly the same way again. In fact, I can't think of any other reasonable way to play this hand. I just got unluckly to be up against one of the two hands that had me beat, and even more unlucky that one of his kings was a spade so that I couldn't win with a flush.

The strange part of the story is this: As he was stacking up the chips, this guy said, "If it makes you feel any better, I'm down about $900 at blackjack today."

Now, I wasn't feeling bad about this hand. I mean, I didn't like it, but it was not a huge amount of money, and, as I said above, there was really nothing I could have done differently. All of our money was going to go in no matter what. I didn't take a bad beat; I just ran into a one-notch-bigger hand. It really was an "Oh well, these things happen" situation and reaction for me, and I had shrugged it off two seconds after it was done. So I didn't need his assuaging.

But suppose I were a more volatile, emotional, dramatic kind of person with a tendency to go off badly in such a situation. What on earth does this guy think will be comforting to this hypothetical opponent in the knowledge that he is down by $900 from playing blackjack? How could that information possibly be comforting to anybody he might be saying it to? Why would any opponent care?

It was such a bizarre thing to say that I went into hyper-sarcastic mode: "Oh, yeah, that makes all the difference in the world! Whew! I'm glad you told me that. I feel so much better now!" It was meant to be funny, not nasty, and fortunately the other players at the table, at least, got that, and laughed appropriately. I guess they shared my perspective that this guy had no clue what would or would not be comforting to an opponent he had just stacked.

For the most part, I feel no sense of obligation to attempt to tend to the emotional needs of somebody whose money I just took, whether it happened because I outplayed him or because I got ridiculously lucky. (Never complain, never explain.) But if you choose to try to offer some sort of solace to a losing opponent, at least make sure that whatever you have to say is actually of some real meaning to him!