Posted Sun Sep 24, 2006 3:30 pm GMT by mindgame
I’ll tell you what Josh doesn’t understand.
It was drama on the high plains yesterday evening and he was the leading man. And okay, he’s maybe 22 and young for the part, and it’s pretty plain in Indiana, and there’s nothing high about it anywhere. You stand on a phonebook here and we call it a view.
It was the sidegame room in what the FOP now calls the Indiana Invitational—my favorite joke of tournament that has suddenly figured out that if you keep on keeping 95% of the money even Hoosiers get wise. They actually give out 20 g’s in prize money now and only keep $150,000 for the widows and orphans. How many widows are there anyway, that they need this thing 8 times a year?
But if you are visiting the center of the Dumb Poker Player Universe, you want to be in that sidegame room, because there’s hardly a loser in the place who can resist stopping in after it’s finally dawned on him—five or six buy-ins down the rathole—that he’s so busted he can’t hope to catch up. If they had an ATM machine in there I’d have never left, we just would have recycled the sheep.
It’s $1/$2 blinds, No-limit, and it’s not even my game. When I asked what the max buy-in was, they said nobody’d asked before so they didn’t really care. It’s just that kind of place. Most guys just fish for bills left in their pockets and buy in for $50-80 bucks. I didn’t want to look like I knew what I was doing so I bought 100 and sat down. Nice civil game…$5 pre-flop raise gets you one blind and one caller. Until Tim sat down.
Tim is addicted to action. Goes out every year to the WSOP and plays satellites like the maniac he is--hoping to get a ticket to the show. He’s having an affair with poker, but his heart belongs to chance. This ain’t your Aunt Mini’s no-limit game no more. He raises $10 every hand. Every hand. The price of the flop, boys, is $12. Deal with it. Of course with that kind of overhead Tim is only getting premium action all the time until a few guys--getting progressively more pissed off that they can’t limp in with their pair of fives--start firing back.
And that’s when Tim REALLY starts to love it because he just puts these guys all-in. They’re sitting there with 75 or 100 bucks in front of them and they just came over the top to make it $25. Tim just grins and says raise $100. And they fold…and fold … and fold. After about an hour Tim’s up about $500 and his act is getting pretty old. Stubbornly they start to call. But if they have a pair of tens he’ll suddenly have jacks. If they raise with KK? He’s got 78o and flops 2 pr. How long can he keep it up? Well I saw him do it for 3 and half hours.
Now Josh is one of your young-gun cerebral players who will tell you just what the odds are that Tim is beating to have this incredible run. But he’s cool. He’ll lay back and smack Tim down real hard, because he knows, he knows, he absolutely knows that, in the long run, good hands beat bad ones. He has a tough time being gracious about it, though, when Tim has crushed his flopped 2pr with another set, calling a $50 raise on the flop with his deuces and then turning a deuce—and it seems like it’s the 3rd of 4th time in the last half hour. Nope. Jush is muttering to himself a little overmuch.
So here’s the moment of high drama. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it stopped everything in the room for a few minutes and there were 12 tables going. I’m UTG. I look down and I see a very nice hand. One of my favorites, actually. No point in doing anything but throwing in 2 bucks, because Tim’s going to do my raising for me and after there’s about $50 bucks in the pot and everyone feels pretty committed I’ll raise it up another $25. Not too many guys will turn down 2-1 odds when they’ve already got 12 in—and only the first guy’s getting odds that bad. So Tim raises 10, there’s a call behind him and Josh, who’s playing about 7% of the flops, raises it up $50. Josh still has about $250 in front of him and I’ve got about $400. I decide I might as well pull a Tim.
Everyone folds behind Josh and it’s to me. “All-in Josh. I can cover you. Count your chips.”
This pisses Tim off in a very large way. He will not be so lightly dismissed. Fact is there are still five live players in this pot. One folds and it’s to him. He stands up, leaning forward on the table like I’m intruding in his show…which I decidedly am. He’s got at least $500 in front of him.
“I got a hand,” he says. “I got good cards, fuxxers!”
“Great. Call.” I say. “More the merrier.”
Tim folds.
Another fold and it’s Josh’s turn: the moment he’s been waiting for. This is the play he’s been setting up for the last 2 hours—and I just pissed on his parade.
Tim’s still on his feet. “Call! Don’t be an effing twit…you’ve got a hand. You haven’t raised five times since I sat down! Strap on a pair of balls and call the mother!”
Tim, it seems, is dying to know what I’ve got. Josh looks at me.
“I think you’re bluffing,” says Josh.
“Do you?…then it’s an easy call,” I say. “But you don’t, or you’re money would be there.”
“I’m totally solid here. I’m high. Real high. You got Aces?”
“What? Why would that be impossible? Aren’t there still four in the deck?”
“I can’t beat Aces.”
“You can’t be ahead of Aces….people beat aces all the time. Okay, let’s say I got Aces. You got KK. Can you really lay down Kings here after what’s been going on at this table? Put you’re money in.”
“You really got AA? If I fold will you show me?”
“What? Are you nuts? Fuxx no!”
“I got QQ. I think you’re scared.”
“You’re thinking about calling me for about $300. I am scared. I'm scared you'll call. I'm scared you won't. Who the hell wouldn’t be scared?”
Josh turns his Queens face up. He’s standing now. “I need to think. I need time.”
“Okay. You old enough to drink? I’ll get us a couple beers. Take your time. I’ve got AK suited. They aren’t going anywhere.”
“Do you?”
“No…it’s AA. Or Kings. Shit I don’t even remember now. Whatever. How far behind could you be with Queens. You’ve already seen me move all-in for $150 with JJ. I could have that, too.”
“Yeah. You lost that pot.”
“Shit happens. I might lose this one. That’s why I could have aces and still be scared.”
Now it gets good here, because the whole room had stopped and they are watching Josh and he knows it. And more than the money, Josh wants to be seen as a poker player. He wants to make the right move center stage when somebody just ripped up the script he’d carefully crafted.
“I really need to see them. I’ll fold these if you show me.”
“You fold, I win and muck. You see nothing.”
So the catcalling starts, of course. The room seems divided but they have no respect for guys that won’t play Queens for the biggest pot the room has seen tonight. Josh is in real pain. He’s pacing around. He actually trys to make a cell call, but that's not allowed someone tells him. No lifelines in poker, Josh.
“I think you’re full of shit, but I can’t take the chance. It’s too much money.
“Fold.” He says.
Now you are all thinking…hey, this is no big deal. You fold the Queens. It’s easy. But you try sitting in a game and battling for hours to get up $150 bucks with a maniac at your table who keeps hitting insane draws. You have to muck hand after hand that would have taken down a $75-$100 pot. It eats at you, but you know your plan. You are playing top 5 and you are going into hyper aggressive. You get the third best hand you can have, you’ve invested $62 in it. When the super-donk say’s “all-in” you will crush him.
But up jumps some old fart who’s already had to buy back in after busting out on a moron all-in with JJ. This guy suddenly decides he’s going to put a move on you. He doesn’t raise $50, guaranteeing a call. He wants to put you all in—he doesn’t want a call. And Tim, when you really need him for the pot odds, had turned his sorry ass for the door and run off with his tail between his legs. You had him right where you wanted him. But now you can still double up $300 and be sitting in front of more cash than you take home in two weeks.
So here’s what Josh doesn’t know. That every one of us, even to make it on the day of conception, was a million-to-one shot. We came in against the odds. We are, frankly, each of us, a statistical impossibility. So we know the odds, good, bad, large, and small; and we beat them every day. We expect to. And the reason we play the game, the reason it’s fun, is that we don’t know the outcome.
Oh yeah. I mucked ‘em.
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Posted Wed Sep 27, 2006 10:05 am GMT by UrAteUp
Great read mindgame....you should write more of these. BTW any chance you tell the forum what you did have?
Posted Wed Sep 27, 2006 4:48 pm GMT by mindgame
Only if you promise me Josh isn't a subscriber!!!
Posted Wed Sep 27, 2006 5:28 pm GMT by Phil14312
Awesome read. Hmmm....I think you had aces or queens....wouldn't that be a doosy.
Posted Wed Sep 27, 2006 5:31 pm GMT by mindgame
I don't think I could have stayed cool if I'd had QQ--I would have just burst out laughing when he turned over. I lost a huge pot once head up with Aces against Aces. Mine were red, his black and we were all in pre-flop. The board was all spades. I wanted to vomit.
Posted Wed Sep 27, 2006 6:18 pm GMT by ninetensuited
my names not josh, i want to know what you hadi think a couple of red aces
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