Bad sportsmanship

There was a small, unusual incident yesterday in the final day of the World Series of Poker Event #3, $1500 Omaha High/Low. As reported by PokerNews:

Freddy Gets Irritated

From under the gun, Pascal Leyo limped. Robert Price raised behind him
and Freddy Deeb called. Thang Luu called from later position as well and then
when action got back to Leyo, he called.

The flop came down 10c 7s 3d. Leyo checked and Price bet out. Deeb called and then
Luu raised. Leyo tanked for a couple minutes and then folded. Price called the
raise as did Deeb.

The turn brought the 9d and everyone checked. After the river came the Jd, Price
led with a bet and only Deeb called.

"Ship it!" exclaimed Price as he tabled Ad Kd 9h 2c. Deeb didn't muck right away, but held his cards as he studied the board. The dealer scooped up the community
cards and began to muck them, but Deeb insisted he put them back because he
wanted to study them to see how everyone played the hand. The floor staff
corrected the dealer and made him put the cards back on the felt.

When he did so, Jordan Rich chimed in, "Just muck already."

"I don't want to muck." said Deeb. Another few seconds went by and then
Freddy released his hand and moved on.

Several things are unclear from this account that might be obvious had one been there. For example, how long was Deeb taking? What's clear, though, is that Deeb must have known almost instantly that Price had the nuts, and that with no low possible, he (Deeb) could take no portion of the pot.

It is certainly legitimate, though not commonly seen, for a player to want to look at the board cards and his opponent's tabled hand long enough to reconstruct what happened in the hand--what did the guy have and what was he thinking in every betting round, etc. But I have a hard time believing that a player as vastly experienced as Freddy Deeb needs more than maybe three to five seconds to absorb and process that information. Heck, I've probably played less than 0.1% of the Omaha/8 hands that Deeb has, and I can usually do it in ten seconds or so, once I have opened the PokerStars replay window so that I can see all the cards.

If I'm right about Deeb's experience and analytical powers, then he was not telling the truth about his reason for withholding his cards. He even went so far as to make the floor person come over and instruct the dealer to put the board cards back up. That is an extraordinary gesture, one that I've never seen. (Two exceptions: If there is a dispute about which was actually the winning hand, or when there is a claim of a high-hand jackpot that was not announced with sufficient rapidity. Those are completely different situations than the one here, though.) It is not consistent with his claim of simply wanting to make a mental reconstruction of how the hand played out. If his card memory were that poor, he could never make it playing stud games--yet he is a HORSE tournament champion and a regular participant in mixed cash games where stud variants are in the rotation.

I think the obvious inference is that Deeb was just being a snot. The most likely reason, in addition to losing the hand, was an adverse reaction to Price's "Ship it!"

If Deeb thinks such outbursts are obnoxious, I'm with him. They are. They are rude, unnecessary, pointless, offensive, arrogant, immature, and inconsiderate. Taunting one's opponent or rubbing his face in his loss is bad for the game and a sign of a generally boorish and antisocial personality. It is always wrong. I had never heard of Price before this event began, but from this one incident I'm prepared to conclude that he is an unpleasant jerk that has a lot of growing up to do. (It troubles me that from his photos (see here and here) it looks like he's about my age, not somebody for whom youthful exuberance and general life inexperience could at least serve as a flimsy excuse for bad behavior. Worse, he looks a lot like me. I wouldn't want to be mistaken for a guy that would act like him.)

But you don't handle jerkitude by returning it in kind--especially when doing so adversely affects every other person at the table (players and dealer alike) by wasting everybody's time. The clock is ticking. If I'm right that Deeb's true motivation was returning the needle, he was just as out of line as Price was, and arguably more. He got down in the mud with Price, rather than keeping himself above it. (I was about to say "rather than standing tall." But there is a limit to how much "standing tall" a guy like Deeb can do. I say this as a 5'7" relative shorty myself.)

Shame on both of them for unbecoming conduct.


By the way, I couldn't tell if the title of the PokerNews blog post was or was not a deliberate reference to the movie "Freddy Got Fingered." My guess is probably not. If it was intended to be, it was too subtle to have the desired effect. Better might have been something like "Freddy Almost Got the Finger."