Praise for alert dealers

After being evicted by the Hard Rock poker room because they didn't want my business (and consequently will be getting a lot less of it than they likely otherwise would have), I drove down the road to the Rio, which is where I had originally been planning to put in today's session, before making a last-minute change to the Hard Rock.

(The drive over, incidentally, took about 30 minutes, far longer than the usual 10 or so. I concluded from the density of traffic near the Strip that there must be some huge event in town tonight. Sure enough, when I got home and did a news search, I learned about boxing at the MGM. This is how closely I follow sports: I deduce that there is a big sporting event somewhere nearby by being stuck in the traffic jam it has created.)

Picked up the chip shown above. I have enough Rio chips now that it's become pretty uncommon for me to spot one not in the collection.

It was a mostly uneventful session, unworthy of comment, except for one hand.

I make plenty of mistakes in playing poker, of course--it's the nature of a game of partial information. But it's pretty rare that I make serious mistakes in the mechanics of the game, after a couple of years of playing 100+ hours per month. It's probably less than once a month that I accidentally act out of turn, or other error of that sort. I think there have been only two occasions since living in Vegas in which I have exposed my hand before it was time. Today was almost another one, and would have been #3, if not for an exceptionally alert dealer.

My stack had dwindled down to about $50, so I took another $100 bill out of my wallet and put it on the table. I don't like playing with cash. I always buy chips instead, and on the rare occasion that I have an unwieldy number of chips to deal with in front of me, I color them up to $100 chips, not cash. There are several reasons that contribute to this preference, but chief among them is exactly the problem I ran into today: it's easy to overlook cash. I'm so habituated to gauging chip stacks that sometimes I don't even notice the currency.

However, from the time that I plopped the C-note on the table until the critical hand occurred (just two hands), there wasn't a good time to ask the dealer to change it for chips. Furthermore, he barely had $100 in red chips in his tray, so he would have to ask for a fill as soon as he sold them to me. I decided that this time I would just wait until a chip runner was at the table for somebody else, and get chips then. I won a small pot in there, so I had maybe $75 in chips in addition to the Benjamin.

(Readers sometimes tease me in the comments for being so set in my ways. Heck, sometimes I make fun of myself for the same thing. But having well-established patterns and habits does help prevent mistakes. Today turned out to be a prime example of what can happen when you deviate from your customary practices.)

I had A-Q on the button and raised to $13. Guy on my right who had limped in then called. Flop was Q-x-x. I bet $20. He called. Turn was another Q. Here's where I made the crucial error. The pot had about $65 in it. I looked down and saw approximately $40 or $45 in chips in front of me. Of course, in the most literal sense I also "saw" the $100 bill, but because I'm used to thinking just in terms of chips, my brain didn't include that $100 in my stack. It looked like an obvious all-in move to me.

I didn't say "all in," but just gave a little shrug, stacked up my remaining chips, and moved them forward, leaving the bill behind. As soon as my opponent said "Call," I moved my silver dollar off of my hole cards and started to turn them over. They were about halfway over--players on my left would have been able to see them--when the dealer got an alarmed look on his face and shouted, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! You're not all in!" He was just in the nick of time.

It was really unbelievable how quickly he reacted. In fact, I don't think it would have been possible for him to figure it out after he saw me start to flip my cards and still intervene in time. I think that what must have happened was that he saw me put all of my chips in, and thought to himself, "That doofus might think that he's all in, if he is forgetting about that hundred-dollar bill sitting on the table. I'd better watch out for him exposing his hand before the next round of betting." Then when it started to happen as he had suspected it might, he was able to step in very fast, because he had already analyzed the situation and made his contingency plan for what to do in case I screwed up in the way he anticipated I might.

He might well have saved the pot for me. I don't remember the exact final board, but the river brought an ugly scare card, completing both a possible flush and possible straight. Had my opponent seen my cards prematurely and considered the situation, it would have been a prime spot for an all-in bluff, which would have been very difficult for me to call. As it was, it went check-check, because my opponent had second pair, not a draw that got there, and he had to be afraid that I had been on a draw that got there--a fear he would not have had if he had seen my cards.

So my hat is off to Woodrow for his admiral alertness and quick reaction. It's not often that I need a dealer to save me from making a big blunder, but I'm sure glad to have a good one in the box when it happens.