A poker urban legend

I heard a poker urban legend today. Oddly enough, before this happened it had never even dawned on me that there is or might be an entire sub-genre of urban legends dealing with poker.

I was at the Venetian. The woman on my right told the story. It seems that her father was in an unspecified Atlantic City poker room when they first started offering bad-beat jackpots. Sharing the table with him was a quiet older woman and two young punks, who were behaving obnoxiously towards her and everybody else. At some point, a rare hand came up, with a straight flush beating four of a kind. One of the young punks had the straight flush. The older woman had the four of a kind. She flashed it to the kid, then threw it in the muck, voiding any possibility of the casino paying out the jackpot. As she did so, she said something like, "That'll teach you to be rude to everybody!" Of course, the jackpot was huge; she sacrified what would have been the lion's share of the money in order to spite the punk and deprive him of what would have been the second-largest portion of the payout, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. (Typical bad-beat jackpots are distributed something like 40-50% to the loser of the hand, 25-40% to the winner of the hand, and the rest parcelled out to the other players at the table or in the entire card room.) It turns out that the woman was independently wealthy, playing poker just for fun, and didn't care about the money, so it was worth it to her to make sure the punk didn't get rewarded for his bad behavior.

So why do I call this an urban legend? Because this now makes the third time I've heard the same story, from three different people, in different locations (one back in Minnesota before I moved here). There is some variation in details: usually it's just one bad apple at the table instead of two, for example. Of course, the jackpot is always huge, never one that was recently hit and therefore near its minimum.

It is not impossible that this has actually occurred somewhere, sometime. But it's extremely unlikely that it has happened so many times that by pure chance I have been seated at poker tables with three people who either witnessed such an event or were, as they claimed, retelling it second-hand. I would not have difficulty believing that the father of the woman at the table today did, in fact, tell her that story. However, I would be highly skeptical about his having actually been witness to it. It is far more likely that he heard the story from somebody else, and inserted himself into it in the retelling--a classic and prime feature of the urban legend.

The largest online repository of urban legends that I know of is http://www.snopes.com/. I searched that site for the word "poker," and though I found a few stories in which poker is an incidental part, there were none centered specifically around the game. So this may be a whole unexplored area.

Note how well the characteristics of this thrice-repeated (within my hearing) story fit the general outlines of the urban legend, as described in the glossary supplied by the good folks at snopes.com:

Urban legends are a specific class of legend, differentiated from
"ordinary" legends by their being provided and believed as accounts of actual
incidents that befell or were witnessed by someone the teller almost knows
(e.g., his sister's hairdresser's mechanic). These tales are told as true,
local, and recent occurrences, and often contain names of places or entities
located within the teller's neighborhood or surrounding region.

Urban legends are narratives which put our fears and concerns into the form
of stories or are tales which we use to confirm the rightness of our world view.
As cautionary tales they warn us against engaging in risky behaviors by pointing
out what has supposedly happened to others who did what we might be tempted to
try. Other legends confirm our belief that it's a big, bad world out there, one
awash with crazed killers, lurking terrorists, unscrupulous companies out to
make a buck at any cost, and a government that doesn't give a damn.

Folks commonly equate 'urban legend' with 'false' (i.e., "Oh, that's an
urban legend!"). Though the vast majority of such tales are pure invention, a
handful do turn out to be based on real incidents, and whether or not something
actually happened has no bearing on its status as an urban legend. What lifts
true tales of this type out of the world of news and into the genre of
contemporary lore is the blurring of details and multiplicity of claims that the
events happened locally, alterations which take place as the stories are passed
through countless hands. Though there might indeed have been an original actual
event, it clearly did not happen to as many people or in as many places as the
various recountings of it would have us believe.

Clearly this is told as a cautionary tale about the importance of being civil to others at the poker table, lest a victim of rudeness visit extreme financial revenge upon the taunter(s). And, as I said, perhaps it actually happened once somewhere.

Or, at least as likely, what actually happened was somebody unaware of the jackpot flashed the huge losing hand, then mucked it before anybody could stop him or her, not knowing that they were throwing away a pot of gold, following which the story was modified as a morality tale. No matter how nasty our species is (and--trust me--I operate under no false pretenses about the awfulness of which people are capable; the rose-colored glasses came off long ago), stupidity and ignorance are still responsible for about a zillion times more bad things happening than is deliberate cruelty.

If you have heard this particular urban legend or other poker-related tales you suspect to be such, I'd love to read about them in the comments.