Awareness FAIL

Since I'm quick to pounce on the idiocy of my fellow poker players, it's only right that at least once in a while I tell a story on myself. Here are two of them from today at the Venetian.

1.

I had some trash hand in the small blind and limped in. I hit nothing on the flop. It was checked around. Nothing on the turn. It's an obvious check-fold situation. My mind wanders for a few seconds, until I realize that the guy two to my left is putting out a bet. I tell the dealer, "I think I'm first to act." The dealer gives me a puzzled look and says, "I thought you checked." This is a dealer I know to be alert and attentive, with mistakes and erroneous assumptions few and far between. As I'm processing his response, two other players speak up and agree that they saw me check. I mentally rewind my internal videotape, and realize, yeah, as a matter of fact, I think I did tap the table in my usual way, then instantly forgot about it.

In the situation at hand, it didn't matter, because I was going to be mucking no matter what, but this is the first time that I have ever failed to be aware of my own actions. Of course I occasionally miss what some other player does, but to take an action myself and not register it consciously? Completely unprecedented. And, I have to say, a little frightening.


2.

Maybe 15 minutes later, I have the button and look down at A-K offsuit. When it gets to me, I'm about to put in a raise, but as I glance around the table, I see that the guy in seat 7 (I'm in 10) has $7 in front of him--a $5 chip and two $1 chips. I would often, though not always, put in a reraise here, but seat 7 was the tightest player at the table. He hadn't put in a preflop raise since the Truman administration. So I decided to play it cautiously and just call. I was running short on $1 chips, so I put out two $5 chips.

Both blinds called. Then I saw seat 7 put out another $5 chip. I opened my mouth to protest that he can't reraise himself. But just then, the player in seat 8 also tossed out another redbird. I hadn't even noticed that he had cards. They weren't hidden at all--I was just oblivious. In a flash, it dawned on me that seat 7 had not raised after all. Both he and seat 8 had just called, but their chips landing near each other had looked to me like a raise to $7, because my attention had wandered when they were acting the first time around. I thought I had merely been calling with my two red chips, but I was actually raising.

An ace came on the flop, it got checked around to me, and a standard c-bet won it.

But this was alarming. I make mistakes all the time with respect to guessing what other players have and how they will react to my actions. But it is rare that I miss the action in a hand I'm involved in. If I miss something, it's almost always because there was an external distraction, or somebody acted out of turn when I wasn't watching him, or something like that. For me to have simply zoned out enough to have missed two players' calls before the flop is not at all my usual state.

For reasons I won't bore you with here (maybe I'll post about it some day), I always look at my cards as soon as I have both of them, eschewing the common advice not to look until it's my turn. So in this situation, I was already tentatively planning a raise, and was counting how many players were in, watching to see if anybody looked like they were getting tricky with a plan to limp-reraise, etc. At least, that's what I thought I was doing. It's certainly what I am usually doing in that spot, and absolutely what I should be doing. Yet I blanked out for long enough for two players to bet without me taking any notice of their actions, which then caused me to make the mental slip about who the chips belonged to.

I'm sure this must sound like a mighty petty thing. I may not be able to explain with sufficient emphasis how far out of character this is for me. Sure, I can disconnect when I know I'm going to be mucking. But when I've already decided I'm going to be in the hand and probably raising, I'm usually laser-focused on what the players acting ahead of me are doing, trying to gauge how much they like their hands, and so forth. (Which is why it irks me so when other players try to talk to me in such moments.)


I needed to get home soon thereafter anyway for an online HORSE tournament for which I had pre-registered. (I was the first bust-out, thank you very much.) But even without that motivation, I would have seriously considered leaving, because that one-two succession of a strange level of obliviousness actually rose to the level of being alarming. I wish I had Ambien or some other external force or agent to blame it on, but I've got nothing. Blood clots going to my brain, maybe. Yeah, that's gotta be it. Time to put the UNLV neurology department on my speed dial.