Mr. Observant

At the end of the post I just put up, I mentioned being observant of some peculiar and not-too-important things at the poker table. That post was already wandering far from what I had intended it to be about, so I wasn't going to digress further. But writing that paragraph reminded me of one tiny thing I noticed more than two years ago, but it was the key to the whole hand, so it sticks out in my memory.

This was before I had a blog, but when interesting things happened to me, I would write them as emails to a friend back in Minnesota. I had sort of a vague notion that some day I would want to be able to refer to them, and having my tales of starting out playing poker in Vegas in written, contemporary form might be useful. I'm glad I did, because when I read back through them now, there's no way I would even have remembered some of them at all, and others would have all of the colorful details lost or transformed via tricks of memory.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from an email I wrote on August 20, 2006, about observing things at the table:

It’s actually not very common to find a reliable, useful tell on an
opponent. I spotted a great one the other day at the Hilton, though. This guy
would carefully stack his chips into, say, 5 stacks of 2 $5 chips each for a $50
bet, then push the stacks forward deliberately one at a time when he actually
had a good hand. If he was bluffing, though, he’d make one big stack and shove
it forcefully forward. I watched him do this twice each way, so I was pretty
confident in it. Unfortunately, he left the table before I got to exploit it.
Damn. It would have been great.

A couple of weeks ago at Golden
Nugget, I raised from middle position. Guy on the button made a slight move of
his hand to his cards before reaching instead for chips—I was certain that he
had made a last-second change of mind to call me rather than fold, which meant
that he wasn’t very strong. We were the only two in the hand. I bet on the flop,
even though it missed me completely. He thought a few seconds, then raised. I
instantly said “all-in.” He agonized for at least 60 seconds, then finally
folded. I’m sure that he had deduced that the flop of rags probably didn’t help
me, and if I had something like AK or AQ I wouldn’t even have a pair and I’d
have to fold to a raise. And he would have been right, except for that little
slip of his hand pre-flop. I was *expecting* him to try to take the pot away
from me, and I was prepared for it. He might easily have made a pair with that
flop, but he couldn’t risk me having AA or KK or QQ for all his chips. It was
one of the purest poker moments I’ve experienced here: completely playing the
player, not the cards. The whole thing could have been done exactly the same
with any two cards in my hand. He probably still has no idea that that little
slip of his hand cost him about $50. Without that, I wouldn’t have dared make
that move on him.