Foolishly showing off

During one of the first hands I played in a session at Bill's last night, two players got it all in before the flop. The short-stacked player had A-4 suited. He was up against K-K. The guy with K-K looked at the situation and said, "You're about 26% to win." I didn't think that was quite right, and on checking now I see that it's actually about 33%.

But that's not the point.

The point is the effect that quoting the number had on me. So early in the session, I still had no clue which players were the experienced ones I needed to be a little wary of, and who were the dundering calling stations. This guy made that a whole lot clearer for me, as far as he was concerned, without me needing to invest any more effort in analyzing his play. People who know, even approximately, hand-versus-hand winning probabilities for pre-flop confrontations are not beginners.

I didn't get much chance to confirm the impression this left with me, because this player (1) was extraordinarily tight, (2) tended to wander around a lot, missing many hands, and (3) left the game not too long after this. But I was left shaking my head at his self-revelation.

One of the skills that I noticed developed most rapidly for me after moving to Vegas was the ability to figure out opponents' skill levels. You know the old saying: If you can't spot the sucker at the table within 30 minutes, it's you. It's true, insofar as inexperienced players have a hard time gauging the relative strength of their opponents. Maybe they'll eventually figure it out, but why help them with comments that instantly signal them that you know the game more thoroughly than they do?

Sometime within the last year I read a column in one of the poker periodicals (sorry--I've spent half an hour trying to find it, and I can't) suggesting that one put one's ego aside and deliberately misstate some poker fact out loud to the table. The example given was something like this: "I can't believe I haven't hit a set yet today. When I start with a pocket pair, I should be flopping a set one out of three times, but I've had nine in a row with no set!"

The idea, fairly obviously, is twofold. First, you plant in knowledgeable opponents' minds the notion that you don't know even basic poker math. Second, you may draw out the egotistical player who can't resist openly correcting you. Knowing that somebody at the table knows basic poker math and yet values his ego more than money is a great insight into how to beat him.

I'll admit that I can't pull that off. I'm so naturally quiet that I just don't think I could be convincing. I also can't do any of the things recommended by Richard Taylor in this great piece for Bluff magazine, designed to convince opponents that you're a complete idiot and put them on super monkey tilt.

I don't act out of turn as if I don't know any better, or naively ask the dealer whether a flush beats a straight. It's just not in me. But at least I know not to flaunt the fact that I'm usually more experienced and poker-savvy than most of my opponents. (Incidentally, this is also high on the list of reasons that I have deliberately avoided ever learning any chip tricks. Excessive dexterity with chips signals a history of long hours at a poker table even to a player too clueless to figure out by other means who the good players are.) If they deduce that on their own over time, fine--but I'm not going to help them rush to that conclusion. Why put them on notice that they're up against better competition than they face at their home game in Podunk, Louisiana? It's easier to win their money when they haven't figured that out yet.

Poker gems, #56

John Vorhaus, Card Player magazine column, December 5, 2007, vol. 20, #24, p. 72:

It turns out that a glaring leak in most people's play is their simple unwillingness to face the hard facts of their play. They get hammered in a game and attribute it to bad luck instead of bad play. They tangle with superior foes because their egos won't let them admit they're outclassed. They justify foolish or self-indulgent moves with specious or circular logic. They leave their flaws unacknowledged, their assumptions unchallenged. And they do all of these things because, let's face it, the truth hurts.

Chip rack on the table

Treasure Island tonight. There's one player who's steaming something fierce because he lost a huge pot when the river card made his straight and his opponent's full house. Now he's raising every pot. At some point he put his remaining chips in a rack and set the rack on the table, as if he were about to leave, but then they just stayed like that.

Finally a dealer told him that the chips in the rack were fine if he was going to be leaving within the next few hands, but if he was going to be staying, his chips had to be on the table.

Now, if a dealer told me this, I'd say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know," take the stupid chips out of the rack, and be done with it. It's one of those things that nobody could possibly really care enough about to make a fuss over. Unless, of course, you're just a misanthrope to begin with and can't stand having anybody tell you what to do, even over the tiniest point.

You guessed it, this guy was just that sort. He argued that his chips were on the table--just that there was a rack under them. The dealer told him again that he needed to remove the rack. So he tried going halfway and taking out just one stack. No, all of them, the dealer said. A couple of other players who were obviously TI regulars had encountered this before and chimed in, confirming that it's a consistently enforced house rule. This idiot kept arguing and fighting about it. Finally he gave in and said that he would remove his chips after the current hand was over. Instead, though, he got up and left. Maybe he thought to himself, "This will teach them not to boss me around!" But nobody really cared that he was gone.

Not all casinos care about having chips out of the rack. I've played in some places where they're positively anal about it, and won't even let you start racking up during your last few hands--you have to have actually stopped playing. Other places say that you just have to keep one stack of chips out on the table. And in some it's common to see most of the players playing directly out of the rack the whole time they're at the table.

It seems to depend on what the casino's reason for the rule is. In some places the motivation seems to be security; that is, they're worried that somebody might hide a card under the rack, to be put back into play when the situation is favorable. (At one place in Wisconsin where I used to play a lot, any player having a rack on the table would invalidate the bad-beat jackpot. This motivated players to police each other even more carefully than the dealers did. "Wait! Don't start dealing the hand yet! There's a rack on the table!") In rooms in which cash plays, there's a legitimate concern that somebody could stash a few $100 bills under the rack, and an opponent might seriously underestimate how much an all-in bet or call could cost him. Some places seem to emphasize the efficiency aspect--it just plain takes longer for most people to remove a few chips from a rack than from a stack on the table, so everybody playing out of racks slows down the game substantially. And although I've never heard this expressed directly as a reason behind the prohibition, it's obviously quite a bit harder to estimate at a glance how many chips an opponent has when they're laid flat in a chip rack, rather than standing in stacks.

But this is really about more than what rule a particular card room has in place on this point, or the reason(s) for it. It's about the kind of antisocial personality that would argue such a small point so vehemently and for so long, instead of just shrugging it off and complying. It's unimaginable to me that somebody could care so deeply about playing from a rack that he'd want to cause a dustup about it--and if you really just cannot function as a poker player unless your chips are laid out in neat rows in an acrylic rack, well then for God's sake call and ask what the house rule is before you choose where to play. In this city you've got 50+ places to choose from. Give your business to the place that will let you use your precious rack, if you must; don't try to buck against the rule where you are, even if you don't like it.

I know, though, that for this kind of demented individual, we could quote Roseanne Rosannadanna: "If it isn't one thing, it's another." That is, he was itching for a fight over something, anything, to make himself feel better (in some perverse way) after having had a big loss. If it wasn't the chip rack, it would have been talking about the hand in progress, or whether he had to post both blinds after being away from the table for a while, or acting out of turn. Or he would have pounced on a dealer for making some small error, or yelled at the cocktail waitress for not getting his order quite right. I think it's clear that his ego was bruised, and he would have taken the opportunity to contend over any little point on which he could assert himself, as a salve to his wounded self-image.

It's frightening how many people there are in the world so eager to lash out over anything, with the least provocation. Fragile egos are terribly dangerous to society at large. If nothing else, it's really annoying to have to share a poker table with such deranged jerks.

"You don't like me, do you?"

If you haven't read the post below ("Good bluff,") read it first, because this story is sort of a continuation of it. It involves the same opponent, maybe 30 minutes after the hand described in that post.

I'm in the big blind with pocket kings. The same player as previously described is in middle position and raises to $25. This immediately conveys some useful information, because he raises frequently, but in virtually every previous case it had been to either $15 or $20, not $25. Instantly the most likely cards he's holding are pocket jacks, maybe pocket queens or tens, because those are hands that are really difficult to play after the flop, which induces many, many players to put in unusually large raises before the flop in the hopes of not having to make any difficult decisions later in the hand.

(Strategy note: It is virtually always a mistake to vary the size of an opening pre-flop raise according to the strength of the hand with which you're raising. This is true whether you make the variance direct [i.e., weaker hands get smaller raises, and the strongest hands get the biggest raises], or inverse [smaller raises with the biggest hands, hoping to get several callers to build a big pot; bigger raises with junk hands because you don't want to get called]. It's fine to vary the size of the raise based on position and number of people who have already limped in ahead of you, but it is never wise to relate the raise size to the cards you're holding. Experienced players will pick up on any such pattern very readily, and you thereby give away a ton of information about what you're holding.)

One other player in late position calls the $25. I reraise to $90. My goal is either to win the pot right now ($50 profit is fine with me), or get it down to one opponent. I predict that the original raiser will call, both because of what I suspect he's holding and because I think he still wants to get back at me for the previous hand in which we tangled. I'm right--he calls, the other guy folds.

The strange thing is that before he calls, he looks at me and says, "You don't like me, do you?" As always, I say nothing and don't look at him directly.

So before the flop there is just over $200 in the pot already. I have maybe $215 left in front of me, which means that any reasonably strong bet I make at this pot after the flop commits such a high percentage of my chips that I might as well throw the whole stack in. What's more, I know that I'm going to bet at this flop no matter what comes. I really hope there's not an ace, because it would be just my luck that my opponent is sitting on an A-K. But even if there is an ace, it's still more likely that his hand does not have an ace (because of the size of his original raise), so I'm going to bet anyway. I'm confident he doesn't have pocket aces, because he didn't re-raise me before the flop, and because he looked in genuine discomfort when putting in the rest of the $90. I have to act first, and I certainly don't want to check the flop and let him check behind, thus getting another free card to catch some sort of straight or flush to beat me. All my money is going in, no matter what.

Given this unusual situation, I decide to pull a move that I use only rarely. After the dealer has verified that my first opponent put in the right amount for a call, and the second player has folded, I announce, "I'm all-in in the dark." Because I'm going to do move all-in anyway, there are some advantages to doing it before I see the flop. First, I can't give away any information about whether I like the flop by my voice or how long I hesitate before acting or how I push in the chips or anything else. Second, it just screams of extreme strength. Any experienced player will conclude that I probably have pocket aces, because I'm announcing, "I can win this hand without any help from the flop." In the event that he has A-K and an ace comes on the flop, I will have pre-planted in his mind a grave concern that that ace helps me more than it helps him.

Indeed, this guy says as much as soon as I make that declaration: "Crap, he's got the aces." The flop is 8-4-3, all clubs. This is a bit scary, since I'm not holding a club. But it's too late to take it back, and, besides, he's extremely unlikely to have made a flush. If he has a flush draw, that gives him more ways to win than he would otherwise have, but I'm still a big statistical favorite.

He thinks for a while, making assorted comments. He says to the player next to him, "This guy (meaning me) really doesn't like me." But he finally calls. He has the black jacks. The turn and river cards don't help him, and I scoop a $600 pot.

It's this business about me not liking him that prompts this grump. I can't figure it out. I haven't made a single hostile comment, action, gesture, or facial expression towards him. I don't think we've exchanged any words at all, but if we did, it was just some bit of small talk. What on earth makes him conclude that I don't like him personally? I'm just playing the hand to the best of my ability, in the way that I hope will maximize my profit. I would play it the same way against anybody else on whom I had the same information as I have about this guy. From my point of view, my actions are utterly dispassionate and impersonal. As they say, it's just poker. I'm just playing the game. I'm not out to hurt him. I have done not a single thing to target him specifically; it was just random chance that we got involved in two big pots in a fairly short time frame.

Moreover, what makes him care whether I like him or not? Is that really why he sits down at a poker table--to be liked by the other players? I'm sure that poker is primarily a social experience for many recreational players, but they're usually found in home games, or $2-4 limit games, where not much money is at stake, and the wins and losses tend to come slowly. That kind of motivation doesn't usually drive one to play in cutthroat no-limit games, where the object is to try to take every last cent of every other player's money. The mere fact of sitting down in a no-limit game announces that your intention is to take everybody else's money as quickly, efficiently, coldly, and ruthlessly as you can. Of course, you can do that while being friendly and affable and having a good time, but surely nobody is under any illusions about the real motive here: it's money, pure and simple.

Oh well. If this guy thinks that I dislike him (I don't; I have very little information on whether he would be an interesting or enjoyable person to spend time with outside of a poker room) and that, as a result, I'm targeting him, he will necessarily conclude that when I bet into him, I'm doing it with lesser hands than what I might use to go after other pots. That will induce him to make mistakes of calling or raising when he's behind, as happened here. So, my friend, if you want to believe--for whatever reasons your fevered imagination has contrived--that I don't like you, go right ahead. I'm not going to lift a finger or say a word to convince you otherwise.

But it isn't true, and even if it were true, a psychologically healthy and mature player wouldn't give a rip about it either way.

Oh, and thanks for the money!

"Good bluff"

More from today's Palms $1-2 no-limit hold'em session.

I realize that hand histories, in isolation, are pretty boring. I'm going to walk you though this one, because there is actually a point to be made at the end.

A guy in middle position open-raised for $20. I was the only caller in the small blind, with 9-9. The flop was 3-8-J rainbow.

I already know that if my opponent started with unpaired hole cards, he will only hit a pair or better on the flop about once in every three times (32.4%, to be exact), so even knowing nothing more than that, chances are that I'm ahead here. The fact that two of the flop cards are little ones makes that even more likely. I had already pegged this guy as a pretty good player, though a little more aggressive than he can really handle (i.e., I had seen him get in over his head and not get away from a pot when should have known he was beat). That made me pretty confident that he would bet if I checked. I wasn't really planning a check-raise, because I needed more information before committing a lot of money to this pot. I wanted to see what I could learn from how and how much he bet.

Sure enough, he fired out $50. Now this was a bit odd--I hadn't seen him overbet the pot before. The size of that bet plus everything about how he made it (fast, emphatically, looking right at me in sort of an intimidating way) shouted, "I want you out of this hand right now." He absolutely did not want a call there. So, naturally, I called, based on the truism that you should always do the opposite of what an opponent wants you to do. He gave me a very quizzical look, and said kind of condescendingly, "Are you serious?"

The turn card is a 4, which almost surely didn't help him. Although I think I'm ahead at this point, I don't have enough confidence in that conclusion yet to build a big pot. I suspect that my call on the flop has alarmed him. To test that hypothesis, I check again, and sure enough, he checks behind me. There is no way this guy would check here if he had an overpair to the board, had a jack in his hand for top pair, or had hit a set. This pretty much seals my conclusion that my measly nines are the best at this point. Just about the only hand that he could plausibly be holding that would have me beat is pocket tens. Now as long as no big card comes that might pair him (I think he has something like A-K or A-Q), I should be in good shape.

Another 3 hits on the river. Again, this is extremely unlikely to have helped him. So I bet $75 into an approximately $140 pot. He asks me a couple of questions, which I ignore. He thinks a while, then folds.

As he tosses his cards in, he says, "Good bluff."

It is that remark that leads me into this grumpy rant. It's not the first time I've heard this, but I hate it every time, so I need to say something about it.

The most obvious response is that if you really think that your opponent is bluffing, then you should be calling or raising, not folding. There is an incredible discordance between your actions and what you claim you're thinking when you say "Good bluff" while folding. Actions speak louder than words, so what's apparent is that you do not really believe that it was a bluff. Which means that you're lying--and it's not even a good lie, but one that is revealed as such to everybody watching even as you speak it. It's stupid.

There are, I think, two main reasons that people say this in such a situation. First, it soothes the ego by covering all the bases. If it really was a bluff, the person can tell himself that he "knew it" (though obviously he really didn't), and if it wasn't a bluff, he can reassure himself that he made a good laydown.

The second motivation is to try to goad the other player into showing his cards, to prove that it was not a bluff. In this instance, I had actually planned to show him my hand, because I was still fairly new to the table and wanted to establish that I was playing in a pretty solid manner. But because I suspect that one of this guy's reasons for saying "Good bluff" was to annoy me into proving him wrong, I decided instead to frustrate him by not showing, and leave him wondering. That's my little retaliation for the smarmy comment.

Personally, I think a much better way to get a look at an opponent's hand in a situation like this is to fold face-up, especially if you add a "nice hand" kind of comment with it. That's a pretty clear friendly invitation. I will usually, though not always, respond kindly to an opponent taking that tack, and show. In battle, when an opponent surrenders, you don't keep shooting. The face-up fold is far classier than the sniping little "Nice bluff," as a means of trying to see what your opponent beat you with. Tit for tat. Nice begets nice. Nastiness begets nastiness.

I guess the reason that it irritated me more than usual today is that, given the situation, it was so obviously not a bluff. I think any knowledgeable, experienced player who had watched the hand play out, not having seen the hole cards, would be highly confident that I had the best hand at the end, even before the other guy's fold. His betting pattern was one of weakness, while mine was one of cautious strength. If my opponent had been unsure of where he stood and asked me, as he folded, "Were you bluffing me?" I would have shown him my cards and said, "No, I think I had the best of it." No taunts or insults, just friendly honesty about the situation.

Instead, he choose to be bitchy and egotistical about it. So, in return, he got no information and scored no points for good sportsmanship. It's a loser thing to say in every situation.

The poker threat

I'm glad that it's rare that I hear actual threats of bodily harm at the poker table. But I'm puzzled that once or twice a week I hear a poker threat. These take many forms, but the most common are warnings like this: "You just keep playing that way, pal--it'll catch up to you." "Next time you raise my blind I'm going all-in on you." "I'm going to let you have this one, but I will bust you before we're done."

Last week I cracked a guy's pocket kings with sneaky little suited connectors that hit the flop just right. As I stacked up his chips, he said, "I'll be coming at you to get those back." There was not a trace of levity in his voice or demeanor.

I don't get this. Well, actually, I do, in a sense: It's purely about ego. A player who lost a hand or was forced to fold takes it as a personal affront to his dignity, and makes that kind of stupid comment to repair the psychic damage. But what I may never understand is why people let their egos get caught up in whether they win or lose a hand.

It's just not possible to win every hand in poker. It's not even possible to win every hand that you contest all the way. All that matters is that, over the long run, you win more money than you lose. That might mean giving up a lot of small pots in exchange for winning a few big ones, or, if you're a "small ball" kind of player, winning a bunch of little pots but reducing your chances of winning a huge one. Nobody keeps track of the number of pots won, because it simply doesn't matter.

So why do people take it as some sort of dent to the ego when they lose or have to lay one down? That fact is not a comment on one's worth as a human being, or skill as a poker player. It's just part of the game.

The poker threat doesn't intimidate any sensible opponent. It only accomplishes a few things, all of them bad for you: (1) It tells everybody at the table that you can't play dispassionately, that your fragile self-image is, in essence, put into the pot along with your chips on every hand. Any smart player will recognize this as a huge leak in your game, because you will do things like make bad calls to avoid the agony of being bluffed, or just to show that you can't be pushed around; you'll loosen your play in frustration, trying to give yourself more chances to get lucky, which will spew more chips to your opponents. (2) It changes your future play for the worse, because now you'll feel some weird obligation to carry through on your threat, targeting somebody who may be a better player or who is just on an unusally lucky streak--to your detriment. (3) It sours the previously light, friendly mood at the table. (4) If the opponent you threaten really was playing stupidly, it just might smarten him up enough that he'll play better, making those chips that much harder to win back.

You pay these steep prices all for the sake of a little phony self-soothing when your poor, delicate ego has been bruised. What a rotten trade-off.

So don't be an egotistical idiot (unless, of course, you're on national TV, in which case it might make for good viewing). Keep the threats to yourself.

"I had to call you"

I haven't yet compiled a list of the Ten Stupidest Things That Poker Players Say All the Time, but a leading candidate for such a list would be "I had to call you."

It seems that this is said with about equal frequency by players who win pots with a call and those who lose pots with a call. It doesn't matter--it's just as stupid either way.

First of all, no, you never have to call any bet. There is no gun being held to your temple. There is no rule requiring it. You get to choose. Now, it may be that in a given situation it is mathematically correct (i.e., a positive expected value over the long haul of making that decision many times in a lifetime of playing) to call, but that is not the same thing as saying that you had to call.

Secondly, it isn't even true that the call in question was reasonable on an EV basis many of the times that somebody utters the dreaded words. If there are 4 parts of a royal flush on the board, and you call a river bet to somebody who, by all indications, does indeed have either the straight or the flush, and you say, "I had to call you--I had top pair," well, then, you're an idiot.

In fact, this is one of the basic problems with the phrase: it is often followed by a statement about what the player was holding, e.g., "I had to call you, I had 2 pair/trips/a straight" (or whatever). But this just reveals that the person is making his decisions based solely on the strength of his own hand, rather than the relative strength of his hand versus that of the opponent--a preposterous way to make poker decisions. You don't get the pot just because you flopped a set or caught a straight on the turn. This ain't video poker, where the reward depends only on the hand you make. Whether your call wins you the pot because you beat a bluff or an unexpectedly weaker hand, or loses you money because your opponent had a stronger hand, making the call based only on what you're holding misses the entire point of good poker decision-making.

Finally, nobody at the table--least of all the guy who you either just beat or just gave more money to--gives a shit why you made the decision you did. Let me repeat, a little bit louder: NOBODY CARES WHY YOU MADE THE CALL! (And it's usually obvious without your explanation anyway, if anyone bothers to analyze the situation.) If you won, you're certainly not going to take the sting of the loss away from the other guy by saying, "I had to call, I had two pairs." In fact, it's rude and unsportsmanlike to rub it in with a speech. If you lost, the guy raking in your money absolutely doesn't give a damn why you made your mistake; he's just wondering if he maybe should have bet more and sucked more chips his way. So you're pissing in the wind with your post-hand analysis. Nobody is listening to you. Nobody cares.

Furthermore, your explanation just reveals a pathological insecurity: you are so afraid of what people will think of your call that you feel a need to explain it. But why on earth would you care what the other players think? If it was a reasonable call, given the range of hands with which your opponent made his bet, and it turned out that he was actually at the high end of that range with one of the few hands that would beat you, then be content with your own analysis that it was the right move. If you correctly sniffed out a bluff or a hand that was otherwise weaker than the bet represented, great, be proud of yourself.

Either way, what is the point of trying to change what somebody else might think of your call by providing an explanation of it? If somebody is impressed with a good call, they won't be made more so by your little self-centered explanation. And if somebody is inclined to think you made a bad call (regardless of the results), so what? Let them think you're a calling station or a moron, and then figure out a way to exploit that erroneous impression (if, in fact, it is erroneous). What's more, consider this: If it was actually a bad call, your justification of it after the fact just makes you look that much dumber in the eyes of experienced players, and they will go out of their way to set you up to make the same mistake again, to their benefit.

In my experience, I often have to think for quite a long time after a hand is over before making a really good assessment of whether a call was smart or not. Your instant analysis is at least as likely to be wrong as it is to be right.

So the next time you feel an urge to say "I had to call you," please just stifle it. It's never true, it's often not even an approximation of the truth, it tends to reveal only bad things about you, and, most of all, nobody cares.

Perfect poker

A couple of weeks ago I was at a table at the Orleans when I overheard a conversation between a player and a dealer. The dealer expressed to the player his surprise at learning that the player had placed only second in a recent tournament. The surprise was apparently because the player had gone into the final table with a substantial chip lead. The player, explaining his disappointing second-place finish, naturally proceeded with a series of bad-beat stories, complaining about what terrible players his opponents were, etc. The player--for whom the terms "loudmouth," "braggart," and "egomaniac" are woefully inadequate--concluded by griping that he had played "seven hours of perfect poker," only to fall victim to other players' stupidity.

I couldn't help myself: I laughed out loud. "Perfect poker." As Bill Cosby used to say, "R-i-i-i-i-i-i-ght."

Imagine what that would entail, were it humanly possible. It would mean perfect reads on every one of one's opponents' hole cards every hand. It would mean never giving away a speck of information about one's own hand beyond what is conveyed in the size of a bet (i.e., never a bit of hesitation or haste in the timing of a bet, not a hint of any facial expression related to the hand, not a trace of weakness or strength in the tone of one's voice). It would mean never betting, say, $100 when a weaker opponent would actually have called as much as $101.

I do not believe that any person is capable of pulling this off more than on a rare, exception hand--and it's damn hard to know that one has done it, because you just don't get the information you'd need to be able to ascertain that it had been accomplished.

I am impressed with the far more realistic assessment that Barry Greenstein makes in his superb book, "Ace on the River" (pp. 204-205):

I typically make more than twenty plays in a session that in retrospect I
think were mistakes. Some are clear blunders that cost me the pot or caused me
to lose more money than I should have on a hand. Others are more subtle. Maybe I
should have check-called or check-raised instead of betting. Sometimes I should
have folded instead of calling, or called or raised instead of folding. Yet, I
have played with people who have told me they play almost flawlessly. I have
never respected the play of anyone who has said that....

I believe the game of poker is so complex that we all make many bad
decisions, but the best players win by making fewer than others. It reminds me
of what Lee Trevino said when he was asked if he chokes. He admitted, "Of course
I choke, but I look around and see other players choking worse than I do. That's
why I'm able to win golf tournaments."

Seven hours of perfect poker, my ass. It can't be done.

Still, I'm happy to have heard the guy say this. It's exceptionally revealing about his psychological state. First, he has a huge ego. Second, that ego is tied to his success at poker--the outcome more than how he actually plays. Third, his ego is fragile enough that he desperately needs the accolades of others--else why bother trying to convince everybody that he's so good? (The really great players don't need to talk people into believing in their skill.) Fourth, he's incapable of honest self-assessment, which perforce means that he's incapable of assessing others accurately; he'll likely think that I'm a terrible player, no matter what I do, which is just fine with me, because then when I win hands, he's that much more likely to go on tilt as a result. Fifth, he believes that any loss is due to bad luck and/or bad play by others, which means that he'll never, ever improve; after all, how can you learn to play better than "perfect"?

I'd almost feel sorry for the guy, if it weren't so much fun to ridicule his pathetic condition.