"Oh yeah"

OK, one last Rio story from tonight's session.

I told you in the last post about the guy who was sitting on my right. This story is about the guy on my left. He was nice enough, and perfectly polite, but, well, not too bright. He revealed this at many times, in many ways. For example, after burning through about $400 in an hour, mostly with bad calls, he said, twice, "I'm forced to play bad cards now. I don't have any choice. It's the only way I can get my money back. I have to do it."

This, of course, is the kind of player I want to find every time I sit down. Unfortunately, I didn't get my fair share of his chips before he went completely broke. I won only one sizable pot, and that was by picking off an unconvincing river bluff. I did it with no pair, just ace-high. (I'm still patting myself on the back for that, as you might have guessed.)

Anyway, there was a woman at the table having one of those unbelievable streaks of luck. She was not a good player, though the guy my story is about was in awe of her. (Much later, when a new player tangled with her, my village idiot even whispered to me, "He has no idea how good she is." I had to stifle a laugh.) Her basic strategy was to play any two suited cards, for any price, muck if she didn't flop a flush or flush draw, and call any bet until she made her flush--which she did an astonishing percentage of the time. Even when she missed, she did things like back into a straight or two pair with what were, of course, completely unreadable hands, so that it looked like she was bluffing with a missed flush draw. Her bet sizing had no discernible rationale to it; she would bet $50 into an $8 pot, or $8 into a $50 pot. But she hit her hands with such unreal frequency that she cleaned up. She made at least $700 in the three hours or so I was watching her. It's not a strategy that can win over the long haul, but it was truly her lucky night.

Anyway, in one hand the flop was Q-Q-4. She bet, and all five or six opponents folded. She smiled and showed her pocket fours, for a flopped full house.

I grinned at her and said, with what I thought was obvious understatement, "I think you might have had the best hand there."

The Idiot speaks up: "No, Q-4 would have been the best hand."

I look at him. He is not joking. He is incapable of irony; it's about seven levels of thinking beyond his capacity.

He's clearly expecting me to respond. I'm stymied at first, not knowing quite what to say. Not only has he mistaken my comment about who at the table had the best hand for a remark about what the nuts theoretically would have been, but he has even that wrong.

Then, apparently because I wasn't giving him his dues for figuring it out, he repeated his observation: "Q-4 would have been the best hand." (He was saying this quietly, just to me--the room was noisy enough that nobody else heard our conversation.)

So I feel obligated to say something. I can't agree with him, and he's not going to let me get away without responding. So I point out, "Well, pocket queens would actually have been the best hand."

There is silence. He cocks his head back, looks up toward the ceiling with a furrowed brow, apparently deep in thought. I swear I'm not making this up: he holds this pose for about five seconds, before looking at me again. "Oh yeah. That would be better."

There's another bit of awkward silence. I break it and let him off the hook by saying, "But I just meant that I think she must have had the best hand at the table, not the absolutely best possible hand." This is calculated to give us something to agree on, and pull the discussion away from his error, so that the exchange ends pleasantly and sociably. He quickly echoes his agreement that she probably did have the best hand there, and by now we both have the cards for our next hand, and can move past the awkwardness.

Of course, maybe he didn't sense any awkwardness. I can't tell.

You know that old saying, "Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt"? Whoever coined that (and it's not at all clear who actually did) had, I suspect, met this player, and had him specifically in mind.


(In re-reading this, I see that my storytelling has once again fallen into a bit of grammatical ugliness--specifically, I have woven back and forth between past tense and present tense. I'm aware that I do this sometimes. It's never intentional, because, well, it's just plain bad writing to do that, and I wouldn't deliberately employ bad writing, except as a sort of special effect, which this isn't. But once something is written that way, it's a lot of work to go back and fix it, and, well, sometimes it's too late at night or I'm just too lazy or uncaring. So I apologize for this lapse in the writing craft. I apologize for this post, for all the previous posts that I have written and left in a similar sorry state, and for all future ones in which it may happen again. For the most part, this is first-draft writing, folks. I try to fix the obvious goofs, but a lot slide by, since I have no editor but myself. This note is just to let you all know that I'm embarrassed by the mistakes, including the confusing indecisiveness in verb tenses. I'm just not quite embarrassed enough to do anything about it, beyond acknowledging it with this half-assed explanation.)