I’d been having my @$$ handed to me in a $1/$3 no-limit Texas Hold’em game for hours when suddenly, sometime around midnight, my luck pulled a complete one-eighty. I’d just taken a flop in the late position in a raised pot with A-J off. To be sure, playing A-J probably wasn’t the smartest idea. But when the flop came J-8-3 rainbows it didn’t really matter. Top pair, top kicker, was the closest thing to a hand I’d had all day.

Things seemed even better when everyone at the table checked to me, giving me what I thought was a chance to bet $25 and possibly steal a much-needed chip-up. No sooner had my chips hit the felt, though, than some guy who’d just sat down – a guy who’d apparently made his first playing hand in a grand total of about 30 seconds – check-raised me.

“A hundred more,” he said in this hardboiled voice, as if he were calling me out in a spaghetti western.

The problem was I was already at the end of my rope; if he were the cowpoke looking for a shootout, I was the bedraggled outlaw with nothing left to lose. I wasn’t the least bit worried about the “buck and a calf” left in front of me, and bad poker or not, it was worth the possibility of handing in my guns just so I could see the look on his face if I won. I threw in the black chip and held onto the rest, hoping the guy behind would give me a chance to triple up in case I sucked out. It would have been a relatively decent play too, except the straggler folded. And that left me looking uncertain in a mano-a-mano matchup with the check-raiser.

The whole situation was so ridiculous on the turn I bet my last $44 out of turn, knowing it was an auto-all-in situation. Then, I stood up, said, “Ace- jack,” and began heading for the door. I wasn’t five paces away from the table, however, when the guy put in the double quack-quack, and presto: An ace hit the board on the river. I really didn’t think the guy had flopped a set or he wouldn’t have raised so aggressively on such a dry board. I was putting the dude on two pair and pretty sure of it. Turned out indeed he had J-8.

Well, needless to say he went bonkers after the ace hit. He ranted for 10 minutes – I timed it – saying, “Ace-jack, you called with ace-jack? Ace-jack, really? Ace-jack!” over and over again. It sounded like a bad episode of the Carlos Mencia show – you know, the one where the Carlos gets his redundancy button stuck on “dee dee dee.”

If you really want to know why he was tilting so badly, though, I guess it was because his raise – clearly announcing how badly he had top pair beaten – had been dissed. And that, in turn, meant that I was an idiot. I mean, such a call against a player of his caliber was so sub-standard it was absurd. He thought I really figured the A-J for best hand instead of realizing I was just getting the rest of my chips in because I was mentally pot-committed; so he put me on brain-dead suck-out artist with nary a clue.

To tell you the truth, when he started his rant a sort of screen of options of how to reply flashed across my mind’s eye – kind of like with “Robocop,” if you’ve ever seen that big-screen classic. Here were the flashing options of how to respond:

A. “Wow, you sound like a real professional! Can I have your autograph?”
B. “Yo, You don’ know me!”
C. “You should have known I was gonna win the pot when my all-in bet was double quack-quack.”
D. “Sir, I am in the presence of your shadow, and the enlightened move is to let your angst pass.”

I chose answer “E”: “None of the above” – and remained silent, keeping it close to my vest because no matter what I said he’d still have me cased as “braaaaaaaain-dead.” It was abundantly clear to everyone except him, though, that it wasn’t a case of a bad player being too dense to wake up about his hand, but a case of a good player, yours truly, playing badly – since I only play solid for so long, and if that doesn’t work, I gamble.

So, no, I’m not a nit, I’m not a maniac, I’m not predictable. Sometimes I’m easy to control, sometimes impossible. I especially stay on the lookout for players who like to steal or go on tilt, or who are stepping down from the “big time” and just know they can run over me and my fellow small fries; that's just my game. Frankly, I’m not averse to playing in the dark when the mood strikes. It’s a mixed bag. And if I take a notion to get my chips up in there, I don’t particularly want to hear what anybody thinks about it….


By: Dave Cinch
dave.cinch@acehoyle.com

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