"Planet" Hollywood was the right place for him

At Planet Hollywood last night there was a weird guy on my left. He was really big--very tall and beefy. He spoke only fewer than ten words the whole time I was there, seeming to have a German accent. When I sat down, he had maybe $400 in chips. As I watched how he played, I could not figure out how he would have acquired them, because he was absolutely terrible.

The first peculiar thing I noted about him was that he was a complete space cadet. The dealers had a difficult time getting his attention when it was his turn. He was neither watching nor listening to anything, as far as I could determine--just staring off into space, in his own little world. It frequently took the dealer yelling at him two or three times to break his reverie. He did not act drunk, move like a drunk person, or smell of alcohol. But it would not surprise me if a urine drug screen on him turned positive for other substances.

He was in Seat 8 (out of 10), which is one of the two corners farthest from the dealer. Yet no matter how many times the dealers asked him to push his chips and cards in a little closer so that they could reach them, he never caught on. Kind of a slow learner, you might say.

The second peculiar thing I noticed about him was how often he checked out. No, not in the mental sense, which was all the time. I mean he would muck his cards when not facing a bet. He did this at the strangest times--situations in which I have never before seen anybody act that way. If he was in the big blind and didn't like his hand, he would muck when it was his turn, even if there had been no raise and he could have seen the flop for free. He would routinely muck after seeing the flop, even with no bet to him. Once I watched him bet $10 on the turn, get called by two other players, then throw his cards away before the dealer had even put out the river card.

He made completely hopeless calls, and equally hopeless bluffs. It seemed that he had absolutely no idea what any other player might be holding.

There were three other pretty good players at the table, and we would exchange astonished glances when Space Cadet did one of these things. The looks were all saying the same thing, I think: "The only question is which of us is going to be the lucky one to get all of his chips."

Well, the answer was me. I limped in with a bunch of other people with 5-5. I rather liked the flop of 9-9-5, since I don't flop a full house every day. I checked. Space Cadet bet $10. A couple of other people called, as did I. Turn card was a jack. I checked again. S.C. bet $20 this time, and it was folded around back to me.

My only concern at this point is how to get him pot-committed to double me up on the river. That required a raise, but I didn't want to scare him off. I had $93 left at that point. I finally decided on a check-raise for the minimum--$40, leaving $53 behind. If he called, then an all-in bet on the river would cost him $53 with a pot that would be about $160. I thought that a min raise would be irresistible to him, and that price on the river would be similarly a nearly automatic call with anything short of a pure bluff on his part. I didn't think he was bluffing, because he had never fired more than one shot as a bluff so far. In fact, I figured he pretty much had to have hit trip nines to explain his betting.

I didn't actually think he had any capacity for doing pot odds calculations in his thick skull, but I hoped that he would have at least a grunt-level sense that he should call the min raise as well as my anticipated river bet.

He did both. I showed him the full house. He made a face and turned over pocket queens.

The strange thing is that for once in the evening, it wasn't his terrible play that got him into trouble. Yeah, he should have raised before the flop, but I would have called any reasonable raise anyway, and the only difference is that we would have been playing for a larger pot to begin with. I still probably would have check-called the flop. I would have checked the turn again, and he presumably would have bet again (though at that point he should have yellow caution lights flashing in his head). With a bigger pot, I might have gone for the all-in check-raise on the turn rather than waiting for the river, so maybe he could have gotten away from it at that point. But who knows?

He lost the rest of his chips a short time later on a bad call that was much more like his previous just-plain-bad ones. He got up to leave. When he was out of earshot, I murmured to the good player who had been on his left, "Please go to the ATM and come back. Please!" But he didn't.


One quick story about the player who replaced him. He was extremely tight--so much so that he had been at the table more than 30 minutes before he put in his first pre-flop raise. I had 10-8 spades. It's the kind of hand that I will often happily call a raise with if I'm in late position, but I usually won't try to take it against the raiser when he is behind me. This time, I made an exception. This was partly because I thought I could put this guy on a very narrow range of hands, given how long he had sat there playing almost nothing. But I'll admit it was also because I had lost a sizable pot a couple of hands before, in which I had lost virtually everything I had won from Space Cadet. It was stinging, and I wanted to get back to where I had been. So there was an element of tilty play influencing my decision. I put up my $12.

I was glad I had done it when the flop came 10-8-3. Cha-CHING! Top two pairs against what is almost certainly an overpair, with a guy who has been waiting patiently for his big hand to play, and may not want to let it go. Sure enough, he called my substantial check-raise on the flop, and then called my all-in on the turn. He mucked (and groaned) upon seeing my cards, but later told me in an entirely sincere and believable manner that he had had pocket aces.

The only strange thing about this hand (and the point of the story, which I guess I'm finally getting to) was the dialogue afterward. I usually say nothing to an opponent after taking a big chunk of his chips, because I know from being on the other end of such an event that nothing makes it feel any better, and most things one might consider saying just make it worse. So I wasn't goading this guy or anything, just quietly stacking the chips.

But he said, half to himself and half to the guy on his left, "I should have just moved all in before the flop." The other guy gave him a puzzled look--because this would have meant open-raising for about $200 in a $1-$2 game, an utterly insane move--and said, "You'd just pick up the blinds that way. Nobody would call."

S.C.'s replacement jabbed his thumb in my direction and said, "He would have. If he'll call $12 with 10-8, he'd call any amount."

Ri-i-i-i-ght. Yeah. That's how I play, for sure, buddy.

Some people are so clueless. I mean, I can understand how it hurts to lose nearly your entire initial buy-in with pocket aces going down to a measly 10-8 on a board that looked perfectly safe. I can even understand him thinking that I was a doofus with no clue how to play the game right. But to conclude that if I would see a flop for $12 to see if I could hit gold then I would therefore also be willing to just shove it all in with such a speculative hand--well, that's just lunacy. But hey, it's OK with me if you want to think that of me. The more incorrect inferences you make about how I play, the better it is for me. Still, you might want to rethink how you judge your opponents, my friend. They're not all as crazy as you are.