Mr. Helpful

Friday night I was at the Venetian, as previously mentioned. There was another player at the table who is worthy of being memorialized here, for good or ill--mostly the latter.

When you get a seat in a poker room, in some places you buy chips from the dealer. In others they sell you chips at the check-in desk. In some you have to make a detour to the cashier's window for chips before taking your seat. And in yet others you sit down and they have a chip runner make the trek to the cashier for you. The Venetian uses the last approach. That means that for the first hand or two, you play without chips. Whatever you may lose, you have to make up to the winner of the hand(s) when your chips arrive. (One time, though, I had the pleasure of doubling up on my first hand there. The chip runner was very confused when she arrived back from the cage and I already had a stack of chips sitting in front of me.)

My first hand, I was the big blind. I know the drill. Even if I don't play the hand, I'll owe $2 to whoever takes the pot. But there was a guy on my immediate left who couldn't leave it at that. Without asking, he takes $50 in chips from his stack and plops them down in front of me. "I'm lending you $50," he says. I don't need it, and frankly I'd rather handle it in the usual way. Among other potential problems, the dealer didn't see this exchange, and will have to wonder where those chips came from. (It's against the rules for one player to give chips to another, because if somebody needs chips, the casino wants to sell them to the person in need, thus putting more money into play and increasing their revenue.) You can also imagine this causing problems if he later claims that he gave me $60, or whatever. I don't say anything about his pushy "helpfulness," but I also don't put a chip out for my big blind, preferring not to touch the chips he has given me if possible. It all got worked out quickly, and didn't end up being anything more than a minor annoyance, but it was my first taste of how intrusive this guy was going to be about everything.

He was the self-appointed table captain, though not in the usual way that term is used, with respect to dominating the action with aggressive betting. He was actually a fairly weak player. But his demeanor and actions in regard to what was happening at the table were clearly designed to convey that he knew what was going on better than anybody else.

Whenever a question arose--where is the action, what is the bet, how many chips does that guy have left, stuff like that--Mr. Helpful was the first to pipe up with the answer. If a player had a question about what his options were or what the correct procedure was for handling some situation, Mr. Helpful was right there. After all, obviously the dealer can't handle such complicated matters nearly as well as he could.

One time when I made a bet of $35, with the seven red chips in one stack, Mr. Helpful reached out and broke the stack down into two stacks of three each and one separate. He commented to me, "That way it's easier for them to see how much it is."

Yeah, well, I understand that. But there's a reason I do it the way I do. I'm not trying to be an obstructionist, but if the amount is not entirely obvious to an opponent across the table, he will need to ask the dealer for a count of the bet, and in the way he asks for a count, the way he watches the dealer count it, and the way responds to the dealer's answer, there is often useful information about his reaction to the bet--that is, is he eager to call, reluctant to call, pondering a raise, perhaps? Mr. Helpful stepping in takes away that potential bit of revelation.

Moreover, it is generally considered very rude to touch another player's cards or chips. It doesn't happen often, but you never know when some scam artist will palm a chip or two off the top when handling them, or miscount and thus cause a problem, or topple a tall stack that then falls into the pot, making it impossible to know the bet size. (The only time I do it is if a player is habitually not placing the items within the dealer's reach, even after being asked to do so. In that situation, if I can do it easily, I'll give the chips or cards a quick flick towards the center with an open hand.)

So I didn't appreciate Mr. Helpful stepping in, but I don't want to speak in the middle of a hand, and I don't want to generate animosity with a guy I have to sit next to, so I don't say anything about it.

Mr. Helpful reminds me a lot of Pauli Gualtieri from "The Sopranos." He's about that age. He has apparently taken up bodybuilding late in life, and loves showing off his muscles. He's wearing a skin-tight shirt with almost no sleeves, made of black Lyrca, or some such silly, thin, stretchy fabric, plus a ridiculous amount of cheap, fake bling, including a hugely oversized cross on a thick gold chain. He has a meticulously trimmed moustache, which looked like it belonged on one of the Village People. As you might expect from this personality type, he's full of stupid self-indulgent stories about his life, his bad beats, his money, his adventures, etc. The earbuds went in a lot earlier than they usually do, with this bozo on my left. It was worse with us being in seats 9 and 10, because he had nobody (except the dealer) on his other side to make a victim of his ramblings.

If you were to ask this guy why he injects himself into every tiny question that arises at the table, he would insist that he's just trying to be helpful. He might even believe that himself. But if so, it's self-delusion. Combined with the other aspects of his personality I described, it's perfectly apparent that what really matters to him is being noticed, being admired, being seen as the guy who has been there/done that and knows how everything works.

To be sure, there is a lot about casino poker that can be confusing and/or intimidating to a newcomer, and it's good to have more experienced players willing to step in and lend a little help when it's called for. But you have to be careful about this, for several reasons. First, it's better, overall, if the new player develops the habit of asking his questions to the dealer rather than to other players. Second, it's easy to accidentally cross the line and give more help than is proper. Third, just like guys who won't stop to ask for directions untill they've driven off the pier into the Atlantic Ocean, some people deeply resent being given assistance they didn't ask for, because it chips away at their masculinity and independence. I flatter myself that I have a pretty good sense of which pieces of advice are OK and when they will or will not be welcomed, but maybe I'm more oblivious to people's feelings that I know. Regardless, this guy was like a bull in a china shop* with his aggressively invasive advice, without respect to whether the player involved either wanted or needed his help. It was pretty obnoxious.

Mr. Helpful's veneer of excessive friendliness was proven to be a sham, a cover for deep-seated personal insecurities, when he started losing and went on Super Monkey Tilt. The first evidence of this was when Seat 5 opened up and he wanted to move there. Because of where the button was, this meant that he had to post the amount of the big blind.** He got into a huge argument with the dealer about this, insisting that he knew this was wrong because at his home casino they wouldn't make a player post in this situation. (House rules do indeed vary quite a bit on this point.) From the glances and rolled eyes and head shakes exchanged around the table it was clear that the universal opinion was this: Dude, it's two friggin' dollars--either shut up and pay it, or go back to your previous seat, but stop holding up the damn game.

The same dealer ended up in another argument with Mr. Helpful a short time later. I don't remember the preflop and flop action, because nothing about them caught my attention. (I wasn't involved.) But it was Mr. Helpful and a guy two seats to his left, who was a scary-solid player. On the turn, Mr. Helpful bet $70, leaving himself exactly $2 behind--a pretty silly move in itself. He had unimproved aces. Mr. Solid had flopped a set, as it turned out, so one way or another all of the money was going in here. Mr. Solid saw the bet, had the dealer count it out, noticed that Mr. Helpful had just $2 left, and therefore pushed out a stack of exactly 25 red chips--$75--obviously assuming that Mr. Helpful would just toss in his last $2, he'd get $3 change, and they'd quickly finish up the hand. The dealer told Mr. Helpful, "He's putting you all in."

Mr. Helpful protested. "He can't do that. That's not a legal raise." Well, technically this is true. A full raise would have to be to $140, and when Mr. Solid put out an amount slightly greater than the bet he was facing, the usual ruling would be that it was just a call. But in this specific situation, where it was only these two players involved, and Mr. Solid was obviously just trying to find the least complicated way of getting the last of the chips in, it was a completely bogus, absurd, hypertechnical complaint. The dealer tried to explain it, but Mr. Helpful was adamant in his protest. Mr. Solid, a quiet, thoughtful, smart guy, quickly relented, so as to de-escalate the confrontation. "That's fine, you can just leave it as a call." He took back one redbird.

So that's what they did. But it was completely stupid, because there was another card to come and another round of betting, so even if Mr. Helpful wanted to save his last $2 for some idiotic reason, Mr. Solid, acting last, would still have the option of making a $2 bet on the river, which Mr. Helpful would basically have to call anyway. As it happened, Mr. Helpful made the bet himself on the river, and, of course, got called, and, of course, lost. Mr. Helpful couldn't just let it go, but continued well after the hand was over to engage the dealer in an argument about how that bet should have been handled. He said, "I'm a dealer, too. I know how these things work." Utterly pointless. Unfortunately, the dealer was not level-headed enough to just shut up and ignore the rantings, but took the bait and continued the argument, thus delaying the start of the next hand for another minute or two of aggressive penis-wagging (which I understand will be an official Olympic event in 2012). I hope they enjoyed themselves.

Unlike my usual approach to story-telling, I don't really have a meaningful larger point to be made here. I just thought this guy was enough of a ludicrous tool that readers might find it amusing to read about him. The world is full of strange characters, and the poker rooms of Vegas seem to attract them in droves.



*BTW, this expression turns out not to be very accurate. For one of most surprising results in the history of "Mythbusters," one of my favorite TV shows, see here for what actually happens when you put bulls in a china shop.

**Simplified explanation: If you change seats in such a way that you will end up in the big blind sooner than you would have if you stayed put, there is no problem. But if you move in such a way that it delays your big blind by more than one or two spots, you have to post the amount of the big blind upon moving. This is to deter nits from moving around the table over and over again in an attempt to avoid paying the blind. Yeah, there really are people out there who would do that, if allowed to get away with it.