Mr. Can't-Take-A-Hint

Another story from tonight's session at Imperial Palace. I was in Seat 10. The guy in Seat 7 is basically directly facing me. At several points in the course of my time there, he tries telling new players that sit down the same start to a bad-beat story: "You should have seen what happened to me earlier today. I lost $600 in five consecutive hands, and I never had worse than ace-king."

Each time he says this, I dread that he's about to launch into a detailed recitation of the whole thing, but fortunately he doesn't. He is either interrupted by other conversation or the play of a hand, or he gets a sufficiently uninterested nonverbal reaction from his audience that he shuts it down.

But the fourth time he offers this introduction, it's to a nice young married couple who has joined us in Seats 8 and 9. They are too polite to cut him off, either verbally or by body language, and, as I feared would happen, given an apparently willing audience, he begins. "First hand. I have ace-king of hearts....." Blah blah blah.

He gets maybe halfway through describing this first hand, when he has to stop to look at his hole cards and decide what to do. Even though he calls the big blind, so he's going to be playing, he looks back to the couple, obviously about to pick up where he left off.

I take the momentary pause to try a desperation move. With exaggerated inflection in my voice, as if I were a game show host, I say, "I'm sorry, sir, but I'm afraid there's a house rule against telling bad-beat stories at the table." I smile, though it hurts. I don't want there to be bad blood among the four of us. I just want him to shut up. I want him to take the OBVIOUS hint, but not take offense. I didn't want to be, y'know, grumpy about the whole thing.

But I did want him to stop. Even the awful din of slot machines' bings and and beeps and whoops, random craps shooters hitting their points and screaming like banshees, and the bad singers that punctuate one's time at Imperial Palace is a cacophony far more welcome to my ears than a bad-beat story--especially one that is going to encompass five consecutive hands in excruciating detail.

He at least acknowledges my humerous tone by flashing me a socially acceptable smile. But it only delays him for about one second. He immediately turns back toward the couple and picks up where he left off. And yes, we got the whole litany: every card, every bet, every outcome, everything he was thinking, every word that got exchanged as those five notorious hands played out. He droned on and on. If a gun had been handy, I don't know whether I would have shot him or shot myself, but one way or the other it would have ended the torture.

I will never, ever understand why people like this believe so intensely that others care about their stories of woe. Surely if they took a little self-inventory, they would recognize that they don't give a damn about hearing anybody else's bad-beat stories. Yet they somehow delude themselves into thinking, apparently, that their own bad-beat stories will be endlessly fascinating to any captive audience they can corner. It takes a bizarrely inflated ego to be so obtuse.

I just wanted to grab this moron by the lapels and yell in his face, "NOBODY CARES! DO YOU HEAR ME? NOBODY! THERE ARE SIX BILLION PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD. YOU COULD TELL THIS STORY SIX BILLION TIMES, AND NOT A SINGLE PERSON WOULD BE INTERESTED! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU THAT YOU CAN'T SEE THAT?"

If I had my own poker room, telling a bad-beat story would be grounds for immediate expulsion. Or maybe execution. Depends on how generous I was feeling on a given day.