I ta;l about Internet Poker and the crazy run I had while it existed and them talk about the nature of poker, a weird player I dealt to, and my favorite hand. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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| Hello everyone, Poker and Politics here. | |
| Wanted to do a podcast just wanted to talk into the microphone because that's what I do do in lockdown life and Decided that I wanted to talk about internet poker because it's a thing that Would be awesome to have right now, and we don't because America is dumb and bad unless you live in New Jersey and Nevada they have running active online poker. | |
| I think West Virginia Pennsylvania And a couple other states are in the process of legalizing it and slowly getting around to the process of turning it on, but it's not happening at the moment. | |
| And if I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me because that's the power of the internet. | |
| People have a lot of misconceptions about internet poker. | |
| Even people who play lots of live action poker, they will tell you that internet poker is rigged. | |
| That it has what they call action flops. | |
| An action flop is basically a flop that hits both players and would convince both players to play the hand very strongly the whole way through. | |
| And so they think that it's designed to generate action flops, coolers, people are cheating. | |
| They have all kinds of conspiracy theories about the nature of online poker. | |
| Now the first thing is these action flops. | |
| Action flops, bad beats, all that kind of stuff, that mostly just happens because people are playing a lot more hands. | |
| When you play poker In person, you get out a hand about every 90 seconds or so, unless it requires a lot of thought. | |
| But usually it's about 90 seconds a hand. | |
| And that seems fast, but when you're playing online poker, a hand can take 15 seconds. | |
| A hand can take 20 seconds. | |
| Online poker is incredibly quick. | |
| The cards are instantaneously dealt out. | |
| The dealer didn't have to shuffle the deck or anything, or pitch the cards. | |
| You have an instantaneous deal. | |
| All the betting is very quick and clean. | |
| The board's laid out very fast. | |
| No one gets confused by anyone's actions. | |
| If you misclick, tough break. | |
| Online poker is a lot faster than real life poker. | |
| And as a result, you're going to see way more hens. | |
| Three to four times more hands than you are going to see in a real game. | |
| So you're going to see more action flops and you're going to see more bad beats. | |
| Now the other really important part of the bad beat equation, besides there being the more potential for a bad beat, is that people are more willing to inflict a bad beat on you. | |
| And by that I mean, if you play an online sit-and-go for $20, it is a lot different than paying $50 to play a tournament in a poker room or a casino. | |
| What I mean by that is, it's not even the 30 bucks, it could be a $50 sit-and-go online, same thing. | |
| If you drive down to your local casino, Or the Eastern Poker Tour. | |
| Or whatever event it is that you are going to participate in. | |
| You pay your money. | |
| You sit down. | |
| You small talk with the other guys and gals at the table. | |
| And then, like ten hands into the tournament, you have a tough decision. | |
| Big spot. | |
| Solid bet. | |
| You could go either way. | |
| You could make the call. | |
| You could make the fold. | |
| The thing is, in that real life moment, you drove out to play that tournament. | |
| You had your day planned. | |
| You were going to go out to the casino and play some cards. | |
| You were going to mix it up and see if you could win a big one. | |
| Take down a tournament and get a couple hundred or a thousand dollars in your pocket. | |
| And the thing is, is that because of that mentality, you're much more likely to fold. | |
| Because you want to keep playing. | |
| You want to talk to some guys. | |
| You haven't seen Bill in a couple of months. | |
| You like shooting the shit with him. | |
| You want to catch up with him and reminisce about the good old days and that kind of stuff. | |
| You don't want to get out of here. | |
| You don't want to have to shrug your shoulders and stand up and walk out of the room and everyone goes, Oh man, what happened to Tom? | |
| You don't want to do the walk of shame. | |
| That's terrible. | |
| So you are incentivized to fold. | |
| It's a part of that situation. | |
| Whereas online, if I got an okay hand and someone moves all in on me, if I hit the call button and I lose, All I have to do is click out of that window, go back to the lobby, click a button. | |
| Bam! | |
| I'm in another tournament. | |
| Bam! | |
| I'm in another sit and go. | |
| Bam! | |
| I'm playing some 50 cent, 1 cent, no limit cash. | |
| Boom! | |
| Back in the action. | |
| Back in the game. | |
| There is no punishment for losing other than the fact that you lost. | |
| And if you're lost in real life or you're lost in the internet, you're still lost. | |
| But you don't have to factor in all those other constraints. | |
| You didn't take 45 minutes to drive to your computer. | |
| You don't have to drive 45 minutes back home after you lose. | |
| You didn't just sit down and now you have to get up. | |
| None of that's there. | |
| It's so much easier to hit that call button. | |
| online than it is to call in the brick-and-mortar casino because all those factors are weighing in heavily on both sides. | |
| So you are going to take more bad beats because people are more willing to make loose calls because | |
| the pain of a loose call online is very much diminished compared to the pain of the real life | |
| loss of a call that doesn't work out for them. | |
| So that's why you see more bad beats. | |
| Now, the cheating. | |
| The idea of the cheating is, it's pretty ridiculous, because people got to understand that the cheating that is done on these sites is not done by the site itself. | |
| The site itself, they're making all their money off of what is known as the rake. | |
| The rake is taking a slice out of the pot and putting it in the house's pocket every hand. | |
| In most casinos, it's something like 10% up to $5. | |
| So if a pot gets up to $50, the house gets $5. | |
| And that's just that simple. | |
| It doesn't matter after $50, the pot can get up to $2,000. | |
| The house still gets their slice at $5. | |
| But imagine if you're an online poker site And let's just say, even though I said a hand takes 25 seconds, let's just say a hand takes a minute. | |
| If you've got a thousand tables belting out hands, and every hand got you five bucks in a minute, that's $5,000 a minute. | |
| You are literally printing money. | |
| That is such an incredible amount of cash. | |
| And even if you only had a hundred tables running, $500 every minute. | |
| BAM! | |
| I mean, extrapolate that. | |
| It gets out of control. | |
| It's crazy. | |
| And that's the thing. | |
| These online sites, all they want to do is take that rake. | |
| They want you to be comfortable, secure, reassured that you're getting a fair game. | |
| So it's in their interest to hunt down the people that are team playing. | |
| Hunt down the people that are using bots or Programs that are assisting their play and shut them down | |
| and tell them you can't do that Because we want more people to come on to our site | |
| feel comfortable feel trust and Get their money on the table because we're gonna take a | |
| small slice of it every time they play and that's gonna go on our | |
| pockets and That's it | |
| That's the house edge in poker. | |
| It's not like blackjack, it's not like craps, it's not like any other game where if you win the house loses. | |
| In poker the house always wins. | |
| But the thing is the house only wins small. | |
| If I win a $500 pot of some other guy, if I have $500, they have $500. | |
| We go all in. | |
| I win, they lose. | |
| I get a thousand dollars. | |
| Well, I really don't, because the house gets five bucks. | |
| And that's the thing. | |
| That little slice the house gets at every single hand. | |
| And that's all they want. | |
| They just want their little slice. | |
| So... I mean, there was the super user scandal at Ultimate Bat. | |
| There was all those kinds of things that happened in the history of the world. | |
| But, um... | |
| Again, that was player side. | |
| That was people cheating. | |
| And it was a blow to ultimate bet when that was exposed. | |
| That corruption happened. | |
| So it's not in their interest in the slightest to have those kinds of things happen. | |
| So they work hard to prevent it. | |
| Now, I can also personally state that internet poker is not rigged because it was in my benefit. | |
| And it's not because I was a good player at the time that I played internet poker. | |
| I was actually bad. | |
| I am now probably somewhere around mediocre at best. | |
| And remember, everyone overestimates their skill at poker. | |
| Everyone. | |
| Except for the absolutely truly elite. | |
| And even they probably think they're a little bit better than they really are. | |
| But that's the nature of people. | |
| We all think that we're smarter, better than we are. | |
| But my story of internet poker is pretty hilarious. | |
| So I was a schmuck, just sort of grinding around, buying in every now and then, losing my buy-in, doubling up a buy-in, cashing it in, blah blah blah. | |
| So, I worked a job, and I had a scumbag for a boss. | |
| And my scumbag boss would do all kinds of scumbag boss things to me. | |
| Like he would call me into work shifts, offer to pay me overtime if I would come in, and then not pay me the overtime. | |
| He would do all kinds of stuff to me. | |
| He had his friends on the crew that were not me. | |
| He would belittle me. | |
| He would accuse me of being gay to people, which... | |
| Whatever. | |
| I mean, silly. | |
| Given how celibate I was at the time, it probably would have been better for me if I was gay. | |
| Poker and politics, angry incel. | |
| But he did his things to me. | |
| He was pulling all kinds of scams. | |
| And then finally, one day, he set me up. | |
| He set me up where I was going to work a third shift into a second shift into a first second shift double. | |
| So I was literally going to work eight hours, run home, go to bed for eight hours, get up, run back to work, work eight hours, run home, go back to sleep immediately, and then get up and work 16 straight hours. | |
| That was the plan. | |
| I did the first two shifts. | |
| Got through them. | |
| Couldn't sleep before the double. | |
| Just got home. | |
| Went to bed. | |
| Couldn't do it. | |
| Couldn't sleep. | |
| 3 in the morning. | |
| I gotta be into work by 7. | |
| And I am just absolutely completely stressed out. | |
| And I'm gonna have to work 16 hours and it's gonna be on no sleep. | |
| And I never called out. | |
| And I had a bunch of sick time. | |
| Bunch of vacation time. | |
| I had all kinds of ways to call out that were completely acceptable. | |
| The call out period was like a two hour window before your shift. | |
| So it's four hours before my shift, I call out. | |
| I call in, I say I can't do it, I can't come in. | |
| And again, I have sick time. | |
| I mean, you're not supposed to use your vacation time in this kind of spot, but people do it all the time anyways, so whatever. | |
| But, long story short, he fires me. | |
| Because that's how he operated. | |
| And that was that. | |
| The thing was, I knew he was going to pull something like that on me. | |
| It was kind of inevitable because of the way he treated me. | |
| So I get fired illegally, which is awesome. | |
| I then talk to one of my friends and I say to them, hey, I just got fired from my job. | |
| So can you loan me some money and I can become a professional poker player? | |
| And he's crushing it. | |
| He's a far better poker player than I'll ever be. | |
| And he's like, yeah, here, I'll give you $500. | |
| Knock it out of the park, kid. | |
| Go nuts. | |
| Go crazy. | |
| I say all this very sarcastically because he's much younger than me and much smarter than me. | |
| And so I get the money. | |
| I've got 500 bucks burning a hole in my hand, and I'm like a complete idiot. | |
| Just like a total, absolute moron. | |
| I jump into this massive tournament that has $100 buy-in. | |
| So I'm blowing off like a fifth of my bankroll in one tournament, like right away. | |
| I get a scalding wave of cards. | |
| I run so good. | |
| I run so clean. | |
| I make it to the final table, I bust out, I finish 8th, and it paid about $900. | |
| So I talk about solid win. | |
| Pretty good night for me. | |
| Next night, same tournament, $100 buy-in. | |
| I'm like, you know what? | |
| I'm doing this. | |
| I'm back in there. | |
| I buy in. | |
| I play. | |
| I run so clean again. | |
| Now, this is a moment of unbelievable, this is just God being on your side kind of stuff. | |
| This is just being blessed. | |
| I am in a spot where I have the second most chips on my table. | |
| The guy with the most chips on my table is in the small blind. | |
| I am in the big blind. | |
| I have seven deuce off suit. | |
| He min-raises me after everybody folds. | |
| I think to myself that there's no way he will call an all-in. | |
| So I just move all-in. | |
| Because I don't think he'll call it. | |
| Because I'm the only person at the table that can hurt him. | |
| He calls. | |
| He has pocket 8s. | |
| I'm dead. | |
| I hit a straight. | |
| I forget if it was to the 7 or through the 2, but either way I hit a straight. | |
| And I doubled through him. | |
| And immediately the tournament went on like a 10 minute break afterwards, and we were talking in the chat box, and he told me that he meant to fold. | |
| That my play was correct, but he misclicked a call. | |
| I don't know if that's true or not, but I take him at his word. | |
| But, I mean, that was the kind of thing that happened. | |
| So, I go on this run. | |
| There was this guy that was a complete psycho. | |
| Had a name that had something to do with Dale Earnhardt. | |
| I remember that much. | |
| And they were just jamming all in on all these hands. | |
| And I raised preflop with pocket kings. | |
| Actually, they raised pre, and I had pocket kings, and I smooth called them. | |
| The flop came out where my kings were an overpair. | |
| I bet they snap-moved all in on me. | |
| I called. | |
| They had top pair, no kicker. | |
| And my kings held up and I doubled through them. | |
| And I was just running, running, running, running. | |
| So good. | |
| And I make it to the final table. | |
| And everyone's knocking each other out. | |
| I'm just climbing the ladder, climbing the ladder, making more money, making more money, making more money. | |
| I take a bad beat somewhere along the line, but I'm still in the tournament. | |
| We're down to three-handed. | |
| Hilariously because this is a running gag that one of the guys Troy McClure that is on Twitter with me He knows this story. | |
| I've told someone else, but I'll tell it here later I have pocket sevens and pocket sevens is a very hilarious hand to me right now But I have pocket sevens and we end up I'm all in for the main pot and the other two guys end up checking it down against me, trying to knock me out. | |
| I hit a 7 on the flop. | |
| I set 3 of a kind. | |
| So there's a 7 on the flop. | |
| I have 3 of a kind. | |
| I win. | |
| I now have the chip lead. | |
| We knock out the guy that was crippled in that hand a few hands later. | |
| I have King-Queen a couple hands after that. | |
| Rays get called. | |
| The flop comes down. | |
| Queen-Nine-Rag. | |
| All the money goes in. | |
| They have Ace-9. | |
| I have King-Queen. | |
| I have a pair of Queens against their pair of Nines. | |
| The board breaks out. | |
| I win the tournament. | |
| I win $12,000. | |
| And that was that. | |
| And three days later my boss called me up and offered me three shifts if I wanted to work for him again after he had illegally fired me the previous few days. | |
| So I didn't go back, and then I just sort of treaded water on that 12 grand for a while, and then I moved to Vegas, and that was the next chapter of my life. | |
| But yeah, so if internet poker is rigged, it was rigged in my favor. | |
| And I mean, again, I was not a great player at the time. | |
| I ran really good, I got lucky in a bunch of spots, and that's something that's really | |
| tough for people to acknowledge when they play poker is that they get lucky and that | |
| it wasn't all skill. | |
| They didn't just outplay everybody. | |
| You don't ever outplay everybody all the time. | |
| You do catch breaks here and there. | |
| That's the nature of the game. | |
| But it is a thing that you have to understand. | |
| That there is skill and there is luck. | |
| And the luck is the tax you pay to get idiots to play poker with you. | |
| Because without luck there's just chess and pool and any other skill-based competition. | |
| And you can't play anyone for money in chess. | |
| It just doesn't exist. | |
| And the whole way you make money in pool is by lying about how good you are and losing a few games for low stakes to somebody. | |
| And then being like, hey man, I gotta get my money back. | |
| Let's play for $200 this one time. | |
| I just gotta get my money back. | |
| And then if they're dumb enough to play you for $200, then you shark them. | |
| Because you hustled them. | |
| That's why it's called hustling. | |
| Because you lie about how good you are until the moment of truth. | |
| It's the nature of those games. | |
| Poker is completely different, because your skill level can be obscured by luck for long periods of time. | |
| And everyone else's skill level can be obscured to them for long periods of time. | |
| You can be winning for weeks and weeks on end and be terrible at the game. | |
| And by the same token, you can be losing for weeks on end and be good. | |
| It's just how the game works. | |
| It's a very frustrating game. | |
| It's a very unfair and unjust game. | |
| But that's how the cookie crumbles. | |
| So, quick aside to the Pocket 7 story. | |
| Because people, they want fast answers. | |
| They want clean answers when it comes to poker, and how it operates, and how it works. | |
| And people's minds don't understand that Everything in poker, much as it is in life, is about context. | |
| You have to have all these little details analyzed in order to make a proper decision and to make an accurate judgment. | |
| Like, in poker there's position, there's chip stacks, there's raising in front of you, there's the tendencies of your opponents behind you, there's endless starting stacks of all your opponents, the starting stack you have, all these things. | |
| There's so much information that needs to go into every decision. | |
| But people don't want to hear that. | |
| They just want to have a farted fast series of rules. | |
| They want poker, and everything else in life, to be basically the little card that they give you at the gift shop in Vegas for how to play blackjack. | |
| They want you to just be able to look at the little blackjack card, and the little blackjack card tells you to split eights, or double down on a soft 15 against a six. | |
| And that's just like the hard and fast math of blackjack. | |
| People have calculated the odds, and we know what the mathematically correct play in every spot is. | |
| But that's not the way poker works. | |
| Poker is an art. | |
| It's not a science. | |
| I mean, there is hard math backing these plays, but hard math only gets you so far in a lot of situations. | |
| A lot of times it's feel, it's judgment, it's decisions. | |
| And I had a friend who never accepted that, who wouldn't acknowledge it. | |
| He just wanted hard and fast rules on everything. | |
| So me and one of my other friends, who's a lifelong grinder at poker and has traded turns being a dealer and being a player and on and on and on, me and him joke about the other guy saying, Hey, how do you guys play pocket sevens? | |
| As if there was an actual honest-to-goodness way to play pocket sevens every single time and get the right result that you wanted. | |
| Because there isn't. | |
| There are no shortcuts in poker. | |
| Poker is terrible and painful and hard and it sucks. | |
| And that's just the nature of the game. | |
| It's cruel. | |
| And you just have to roll with that. | |
| You have to learn through experience. | |
| And that will almost assuredly mean you will lose money. | |
| But eventually that tutelage that you pay in money will come back to you if you're skillful enough and you're smart enough and you have enough mental toughness. | |
| So that's the Pocket Seven story. | |
| I've told this story in text on a Twitter thread that got no engagement because my poker stuff on Twitter is just, oh, poker politics is talking poker. | |
| Get back to yelling at QAnon again. | |
| Do the funny thing, poker! | |
| Do the Q thing! | |
| And also, it doesn't translate very well in text. | |
| So here is the story of the weirdest person I have ever dealt to at a poker table. | |
| And I dealt Andy Dick once when he was out of his mind on drugs. | |
| Of course, he didn't even move. | |
| He was just an inert statue for the half hour that I was dealing to him. | |
| So it wasn't that bad. | |
| So I tapped out the previous dealer. | |
| That's the very technical term we use in Las Vegas for getting the dealer that's dealing out of their chair. | |
| You give them a little tap on the shoulder and let them know that you're coming in. | |
| And then they get up, you sit down, you start dealing. | |
| The dealer gets up and he looks at me and says, you're going to be the only person who can hear the three seat. | |
| The three seat is very far away from the dealer, so I'm like, I don't understand how that's even possible. | |
| The guys next to him are going to be able to hear him better than I am, because I'm, I'm practically the other side of the world compared to that guy. | |
| So I'm dealing and then the three seat starts talking and his voice is really, really high pitched. | |
| I mean, he is just, he's like a dog whistle. | |
| And I realized that because no one's fighting to hear him, it's really hard for anyone to actually hear him. | |
| And because I'm the dealer, I am trying to hear him. | |
| So the other dealer was right. | |
| I'm the only person who can hear this guy. | |
| And then finally, Big Hand breaks out. | |
| And he makes a free flop raise. | |
| And everyone's calling him because it's a very loose game in the middle of the night. | |
| 1-2, no limit. | |
| As everyone's calling him, he says, I hope nobody calls me. | |
| I have a monster. | |
| In this unbelievably lilting high voice, the voice that I'm giving you is not as high as this guy's voice was. | |
| It was like he was speaking in falsetto. | |
| It was crazy. | |
| And everyone calls him because they can't hear him, and it doesn't matter. | |
| I put down the flop. | |
| A couple players checked to him. | |
| And then the words that are seared into my mind, the way all the crazy people tell me that the Bethesda art and the Bethesda emails and all the criminality of those pieces of evidence should be seared into my mind. | |
| The words that are seared into my mind from this crazy guy are uttered, where he declares in a quote, I'm going to bet the maximum Which means he's all in. | |
| That's what betting the maximum means when you are playing no-limit poker. | |
| So this man has just declared an all-in. | |
| There is a pregnant pause. | |
| And again, nobody at the table can hear this guy because his voice is just on another level. | |
| It's so high-pitched. | |
| And then he says, in my mind, which is $50. | |
| And then he puts out a $50 bet. | |
| And no one says anything. | |
| No one reacts. | |
| Because, again, they can't hear it! | |
| This guy just said he was all in, and then he declared, uh, takes his backsies. | |
| Because he bet the maximum. | |
| In his mind. | |
| Which, uh, is the kind of logic that QAnon yearns to be as coherent as. | |
| So he puts in the $50 bet, gets called by one guy, The turn comes out, and he bets, and the guy folds. | |
| He tries to give that guy his money back, and I won't let him, because you're not allowed to do that in a poker game when there's multi-way action preflop. | |
| And he shows pocket kings, so he really did have a monster, and that monster made it so that he bet the maximum in his mind, and that was $50. | |
| The question section, question and answer section, is one question, and it is, what is the favorite hand I've played? | |
| Now I could just be lazy and say that King-Queen that won me the twelve grand was my favorite hand, but that was kind of perfunctionary. | |
| It was just the nature of heads-up poker in that moment. | |
| It was cool to win the money, but I didn't play that hand with any real skill. | |
| Just flopped top pair heads up, jammed the chip ten, caught a call, held up, won. | |
| The hand I'm most proud of, which is my favorite hand, was in a very low stakes tournament And I had Ace-Queen. | |
| A parking lot hand, as people will tell you. | |
| A very hated hand in the poker community. | |
| Because the poker community hates everything. | |
| We're just a bunch of miserable sods. | |
| So I've got Ace-Queen. | |
| And I raise. | |
| And the guy in early position Calls. | |
| Not a blind, but in early position, he limped, and he called my raise. | |
| And the flop came out ace high. | |
| Like, ace, ten, whatever. | |
| Ace, ten, six. | |
| Just two small cards would go with my ace. | |
| So I've got ace queen. | |
| He checks to me. | |
| I put out a bet. | |
| Bowed half pot. | |
| He calls. | |
| Turn is a brick. | |
| It's another small card. | |
| Maybe like a 4 or 3, so I don't know. | |
| He checks. | |
| I bet 3 quarters pot. | |
| Sizable bet. | |
| Not compared to our stacks. | |
| That's very early in the tournament. | |
| So the pot is probably at this point somewhere around $1,000 to $1,500. | |
| And we have about $15,000 in chips or so. | |
| Maybe $20,000 in chips. | |
| and we have about 15,000 in chips or so, maybe 20,000 in chips. | |
| And so I probably bet about a thousand or 1250. | |
| He thinks about it, thinks about it, thinks about it, and he calls me. | |
| And the turn is another blank. | |
| Another small card. | |
| And I look at him. | |
| And the thing was, at this point, I really did not have a great read on his hand. | |
| I thought I was ahead the whole way. | |
| Figured Ace Queen was good. | |
| He limped pre. | |
| He would have raised pre with Ace King if he had it. | |
| He would have raised with Aces or Kings if he had those. | |
| I'm obviously beating Kings right now, but whatever. | |
| If you've got a set of 10s, God bless them. | |
| But that's a really odd line to take with a set of 10s where you're just check calling me down and potentially having weird cards come out. | |
| I forget if there was a flush draw on the board or not. | |
| This hand was a very long time ago. | |
| Anyhow, on the river he doesn't act for a while. | |
| He's just sort of sitting there, stewing. | |
| And his body language is really angry. | |
| He's just so frustrated with how the inn played out that he had something and it didn't work out. | |
| And he just is so tense and everything about him is really off. | |
| And he sits there and he stews for a good minute, 90 seconds or so. | |
| And then he finally announces he's all in. | |
| And I'm just like, man, that is not what I wanted to see. | |
| Because at that point, again, I was kind of I'm thinking about just checking it back and just turning my cards over. | |
| I really wasn't exactly sure where I stood in the head. | |
| I thought I was ahead, but again, this was a long time ago. | |
| I was a weaker player, a more cowardly player. | |
| Probably would have put in a value bet on the river nowadays, but... So I'm facing this all in, and I'm just looking at it. | |
| I'm just like, why is he moving all in on me here? | |
| Because it makes no sense. | |
| Again, he limped pre, just called my raise pre, check-call flop, check-call turn. | |
| This is what we in the poker community call a line or a story. | |
| And what that means is, what are you doing with your hand that would give me the information to figure out what your hand is? | |
| And what you do each street kind of narrows down what possible hands you could have. | |
| Because you'd play one hand one way, you'd play another hand another way. | |
| And that's just the nature of poker. | |
| And the really elite players are playing their hands in these unbelievably deceptive and weird ways. | |
| And sometimes the weirdest, most deceptive way to play their hand is to play it incredibly straightforward. | |
| And you just kind of, you kind of square the circle and run yourself back to the start. | |
| And it's just kind of like, I didn't think you'd raise preflop with aces in that spot. | |
| Because it's just, you've been just messing with people for so many years and doing so many tricks that it almost comes to a point where you're doing wacky stuff and you do the wacky stuff more than you do the normal conventional stuff. | |
| But this guy's line makes no sense that he has a hand that's better than my ace queen. | |
| His story makes no sense, because if he'd flopped Ace-10, if he'd flopped Two-Pair, he would have tried to get more money into the pot pre... I mean post-flop. | |
| He would have tried to get more money on the flop, he would have tried to get more money in on the turn. | |
| And his all-in on the river is just fishing with dynamite. | |
| He's getting no value out of the hand. | |
| He's just trying to push me off. | |
| It makes no sense. | |
| If he had the a6 on the flop, he would have protected it, because he knows if a10 comes out, his hand is counterfeit. | |
| And the board can very easily run out another pair higher than the 6, and he'll lose that way. | |
| If he had a set, he would try to get more value early in the hand. | |
| There's no good hand that I can see him playing this way that's logical. | |
| And on top of that, again, his body language is so weird that he's just this weird, frustrated dude who was looking for a card, apparently, and he just didn't find it. | |
| So, even though I am I'm absolutely a spineless coward. | |
| I find the courage and I call. | |
| And being a bad player, I table my Ace-Queen immediately. | |
| I don't even wait for him to show me his hand. | |
| And even though it's an all-in and I have a right to see his hand, after I table my Ace-Queen, he snap-mucks. | |
| Just throws his cards right into the trash, gets out of his chair, and storms out of the building. | |
| And that's it. | |
| I knocked him out. | |
| And people were like, oh man, good call, good call. | |
| You only had one pair. | |
| I don't know that I would have risked all my chips with one pair. | |
| And this takes us back to the start of the podcast. | |
| This was very early in the tournament. | |
| This was within the first 30 minutes of the tournament. | |
| So, those are the spots where a person makes the fold, because they have the whole day in front of them. | |
| That tournament usually goes about, like, it can go six, six and a half hours. | |
| Maybe seven hours if people are playing really slow. | |
| And people kind of plan their day around it, that they're going to come in and they're going to play the whole thing the whole way. | |
| And they don't want to get knocked out in a half hour and have to go hang out and play blackjack all day. | |
| They budgeted for this small-stakes little tournament. | |
| They didn't budget for a day of playing craps or pit games or playing cash poker that they're not a fan of. | |
| They wanted to play a low-impact, low-risk tournament and have some fun. | |
| And that was my thing. | |
| I was going to have to get in the car. | |
| I was going to have to leave if I'd lost that hand. | |
| But I stuck to my guns, and I made the call, and I was right. | |
| So that's the hand I'm most proud of, because it wasn't the toughest call in the world. | |
| I've seen people make calls with King High and be right a lot. | |
| But that was one of the toughest calls I've ever made. | |
| in a tough spot, getting knocked out of a tournament or crippled down to near worthless. | |
| I mean, me and the guy had almost the same stack because it was so early in the tournament we | |
| hadn't played any hands. And I just got through it. So yeah, that ace queen is my favorite hand | |
| because it was it was a decision and that's what poker is all about. | |
| It's making right decisions, thinking through the situation, analyzing what's going on, and if this guy just played the hand incredibly backwards and incredibly wrong, and just did happen to have Ace-Tender, did happen to have a set, then God bless him! | |
| I'm out of the tournament! | |
| Only a bad player would play that way. | |
| And if you're going to lose to a bad player making a bad play, then there's nothing you can do about that. | |
| That's one of the terrible things about poker. | |
| You're going to have to step on that landmine and get blown up every now and then. | |
| It's just the nature of the game. | |
| So, uh, yep. | |
| My favorite hand was the Ace-Queen early in the tournament one day. | |
| Low stakes. | |
| Don't even know if I cashed in that tournament, but it was fun. | |
| And that'll about wrap this up. | |
| I'll throw out the fishing rod and see what you guys want me to talk about tomorrow night or the next night, whatever. | |
| Because I like doing these and I hope they're enjoyable. |