Stories, stories, stories

I got six, count 'em, six stories out of a long (for me), eight-hour session at Planet Hollywood yesterday. None of them is particularly profound, and none of them prompts me to write a longer diatribe about some subject, so I didn't think any of them merited a separate post. Instead, I'll just collect them here. They have nothing in common, except for having occurred on the same day in the same place.

1. Excellent situational awareness

This occurred on just the second or third hand after I sat down in seat #1. I was not involved in the hand. The flop was A-Q-x, and the turn and river were both small cards, no flush, no obvious straight possibilities. On both the flop and turn, seat 8 checked, seat 2 bet, and seat 8 called. On the river, the same happened again, except that this time seat 2 held an ace up to full view of everybody for about ten seconds as he pushed $35 forward. Seat 8 never looked up, just asked how much the bet was, then said, "I call." He then turned over his queen (second pair), looked up (immediately after seat 2 had put his ace back face-down on the felt), and asked, "Do you have an ace?" The whole table burst out laughing. Seat 8 had no idea what was so funny. Somebody said, "Dude, he was showing you his ace while he bet." At first, seat 8 didn't believe this, but when everybody at the table, including the dealer, confirmed it, he could do nothing but join in the laughter at his own expense for having been too absorbed in his thoughts to lift his eyes a few degrees above the horizon and see the plain evidence that he was beat before he made the final call. I've never seen anything like that before.

2. Not my turn

At one point I was in late position. Seat 9 (PH runs 9-handed games, so seat 9 is on the dealer's immediate right) looked at his hole cards and left the table. This is rude and against the rules, because it suggests that one is folding out of turn, which gives improper information to the players taking their turns. Anyway, the action got to seat 9, and he wasn't there. But his cards were still where he had put them down. He had not pushed them forward or towards the muck, so it was not obvious to me that his hand was dead. For all I knew, he might be a few feet behind me about to return, or maybe he had whispered to the dealer that he'd be right back. The dealer was in the middle of discussing something unrelated with the floorman (about breaks, and who was to push whom, and who would be going home early, blah, blah, blah).

The guy in seat 5 started pressing me to take my turn. But it seemed to me that I couldn't just assume that seat 9's hand was dead; as I said, he might have asked the dealer to hold things up for a minute. Far stranger things than that have happened. Seat 5 apparently thought I was a complete idiot and couldn't figure out what was going on. Three times--each with increasing emphasis--he insisted that I go. I just ignored him and waited for the dealer to take action. Finally she finished what had been distracting her, saw 9's cards, looked around, didn't see him, and killed his hand. I then folded in turn. Seat 5 looked at me disgustedly and shook his head. After all, I had cost him something like a precious 15 seconds of his life.

I still maintain that I acted properly. I just don't have the right or authority to kill another player's hand or to assume that it's dead before the dealer takes action. Yes, I have a pretty good idea what's most likely to happen, but I don't want to make incorrect assumptions, then have a big mess result because of some small fact that I might have overlooked.

3. Today's brilliant strategic advice

There was a funny and attractive young woman in seat 6 nearly the entire time I was there. But she wasn't a very good player. In one memorable hand, she had pocket jacks, but limped in along with about five other players. The flop was something like 6-7-8. She checked it, as did everybody else. The turn was a blank. She made a small bet and got called in two places. The river brought a 10. One of her opponents bet big, the other called. She realized that one or both of them must have made a straight, and folded her jacks face up. Indeed, both opponents did have the same straight and split the pot.

She was lamenting her rotten luck. Somebody asked her, "Why didn't you raise before the flop?" She said, "I didn't want to scare people away." She was then asked, "Why didn't you bet on the flop?" She said, again, more emphatically, "I didn't want to scare people away!"

Ingenius strategy, eh?

For the rest of the session, anytime somebody won the pot with a bet on the flop, the guy in seat 2 and I would quietly make a sarcastic comment about how the winner had misplayed the hand by scaring off all of his opponents. "He doesn't understand that you have to let them catch up and beat you."

4. Underprotecting and overprotecting

Early in the session, before the cool guy joined us in seat 2, that chair was occupied by a grumpy guy I've played with a few times before around town. An odd series of three hands resulted in him leaving the game.

He won a large pot on the first hand. He was then in the big blind, and still busy stacking up the chips as the second hand was dealt. He hadn't even picked up his cards when the under-the-gun player in seat 3 folded. But in the process of flicking his cards back to the dealer, they accidentally skidded across the top of seat 2's down cards, which were still quite far out in front of him, unprotected. The dealer, therefore, correctly scooped up both hands and put them in the muck. (If your hand is unprotected, and another player's discards run into yours, your hand is deemed dead. The underlying reason for this is that in such a situation it becomes impossible to know that you have been left with the same two cards you were originally dealt.) Seat 2 didn't understand what had happened. When the hand was over, he politely asked the dealer to explain it, and received an equally polite response. It seemed that all was well, no feelings hurt.

On the very next hand, however, the opposite problem arose. Seat 2, now being hyperaware of the need to protect his cards, went to the other extreme and completely covered them with his large hands. The player in seat 8 bet on the flop, seat 9 folded, and the dealer thought the hand was over, because he couldn't see seat 2's cards. He had already turned the three flop cards face down when seat 2 spoke up and stopped him. Everything was still playable: the dealer had not intermixed the stub of the deck (that's the cards still in his hand) with the muck, and merely had to turn the flop back face-up to get everything the way it had been. But in the process, he gently scolded seat 2 for hiding his cards, reminding him that the cards have to remain visible to the table at all times. However, no damage had been done, and seat 2 could still respond to the current bet.

Instead, seat 2 mucked his hand angrily, while claiming that he wanted to play it because it was a strong hand, but he said he wouldn't stay another minute at a table where the dealer was treating him so badly. He picked up his chips and stormed off.

The dealer had done everything right. Both I and another player, who was an off-duty dealer, reassured him of that.

Apparently this guy just couldn't grasp that there is a happy medium between leaving your cards unprotected way out in front of you, where they might become fouled by somebody else's discards or accidentally picked up by the dealer, and keeping them completely hidden from view.

Poor dealers: You do everything right, the player screws up, and you get blamed for it. I guess you have to develop a thick skin for that job.

5. Celebrity non-sighting

I had chosen PH rather arbitrarily for the session, not having been aware until after I got there that it was the venue for last night's star-studded premiere of the new movie "88." Apparently Al Pacino was there for the premiere (since he's the star of the film). But he didn't bother stopping in to say hello at the poker room. Bastard.

6. The Brotherhood

The big convention in town this week is the National Association of Broadcasters. A couple of players at the table were here for it. Down at my end of the table, a conventioneer in seat 4 asked seat 2 (not the jerk who stomped off mad, but the cool guy who replaced him) whether he, too, was here for the conference. Seat 2 asked "What conference?" Seat 4 said, "The NAB." Seat 2 asked, "What's the NAB?" Seat 4 got an impish look on his face and was obviously trying to think of a clever fake answer with which he could pull seat 2's leg, for not knowing about the big meeting. But he finally couldn't think of one, and had to give the straight answer. I said the first thing that popped into my head: "It's the National Aryan Brotherhood."

This not only brought laughs (fortunately; some people obviously would react differently), but provided fodder for a series of running jokes through the session. When one of the three of us would win a pot, one of the others would say in mock seriousness, "A win for the Brotherhood." We decided that we didn't like spade or club flushes: too many black cards. We declared that we liked aces best, because they had the most white on them. Etc. It was great subversive fun.

There aren't many places left in this country where one can be so openly politically incorrect and not run a serious risk of being fired or arrested or assaulted or sued. Thank God the poker table seems to be one of the last remaining refuges at which one can let humor take its natural course, without excessive self-censorship.