Tuesday, March 25, 2008

I'm officially scary




Last night I played in the weekly MATH ("Mondays at the Hoy") bloggers' tournament. I was at a table for most of my time with Julius_Goat ("The Goat Speaks" at http://jgoat.blogspot.com/) and Al Can't Hang (http://alcanthang.blogspot.com/).

When playing online, I have an unfortunate tendency to think people are bluffing at me a lot more often than they really are. Two or three times Julius saw me reraise all-in into a better hand that I was confident was nothing--and win, with horrible, ugly suckouts. In fact, one of those was against Julius himself.

After about the third time that I showed my prowess at misidentifying bluffs and catching incredily lucky, I had built an embarrassingly large stack by virtue of this repeated folly. That's when I screen-captured this lovely moment: Julius announcing in the chat box that he stands in fear of me.

When I'm playing tournaments online, there is very little reason for anybody to fear my poker talent, especially in a six-max tournament, since I suck even worse at shorthanded play than regular full tables. (Nobody ever has real hands when playing short, right? This moral certainty on my part exacerbates my already tragic tendency.) But once in a while, there is indeed reason to fear my frightening ability to catch absurdly lucky cards.

It didn't last, though. It never does. It was inevitable that somebody would put the reverse suckout on me, following which my next misidentification of a bluff didn't work out quite as well as the previous ones had, and I was gone. I was really close on that read, though--he only had A-K.

So, Julius, when do we get to see the player profile based on me--you know, the guy who is metaphysically certain that everybody is always bluffing at him?

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