Money Hater

Our friend The Golden Boy and his little gamboooling girlfriend brought us a Halloween gift last night.  It is a Jack-O-Lantern that is being devoured by little cannibalistic Jack-O-Lanterns.  We did not have a candle handy, so The Golden Boy saw fit to use a road flair to illuminate the thing.

I do not typically show bluffs.  Making pairs in limit hold’em is difficult, so I want my opponents assuming I always have something.  This is especially true since I typically never have anything and need them to fold.  There are some instances when I will show a bluff.  Spite is such an instance.

The other day I was involved in a pot with a player who is in the game quite regularly.  He is a white male who is around my age, but the similarities between us end there.  I am fairly certain he fancies himself a professional poker player (he probably plays more hours per week than I do), but it is pretty clear that he was born with a silver spoon up his ass, thus any income he makes from poker is immaterial.  Besides, even if he is indeed a winning player, he doesn’t win enough to maintain his “balla” lifestyle.

This player is extremely annoying on a variety of levels.

First of all, he sucks at poker.  This in itself is not a crime, for most people are awful at limit hold’em, but you do not get to suck yet still talk as if you know how to play this game.   The other day he gave me a back-handed berating when he disgustedly said, “4betting Ace-King again, eh Bob?”, as he fired two queens into the muck on a K-high board.  It would have been enjoyable to say,  “Well, I typically make the best possible play in every situation, so yes, I did indeed 4bet the AK of diamonds, you dumb son of a bitch.  The level of competence with which I play this game is light years beyond the scope of what your limited intellect can fathom, thus you are not to ever question the way I play a hand.  Ever.  Understand?”  Fortunately I have too much of my mother in me and instead I simply replied, “Sometimes a king comes”, and went back to listening to my music as I stacked up a fleet of chips that used to be his.

Second, this guy is white.  I have nothing against white people (in fact my whole family is white), but there are certain things that white guys who call themselves professional poker players simply do not get to do, and yet this guy does many of these things.  He will call for set ups.  He will ask the dealer to scramboool the cards when things are going poorly for him.  He will berate dealers that do not allow him to win, and will even go so far as to sit out if he feels the dealer is bad for him.  These are all things that happen frequently at the poker table, but they are reserved for hot blooded little Asian and Persian and Armenian gambooolers who have no idea what the hell they are doing, not for white guys who think they are professionals. (Recently one player who plays pretty well got frustrated with yet another set up and quipped, “I don’t understand why you guys always ask for set ups, and I’m even Asian!!!”)   Such behavior is simply unacceptable from a white guy, and everyone at the table knows it.  A friend of mine even called this guy out on his poor behavior a few months back, but those words clearly fell on deaf ears for he is back at it.

Third, this guy wears clothes that I hate.  Designer T-shirts that cost over 80 bucks and have all kinds of dumb patterns and jewels on them.  Expensive jeans that have ridiculous stitching on the pockets and wear spots on them that were placed there INTENTIONALLY.  Not only does this guy buy jeans with holes in them, he actually pays MORE for them because they had to pay some idiot to go beat these pants with a rock until they were all tattered and torn.    Who wears this crap?  High school kids, that’s who.  This attire should not be worn by anyone ever, but definitely not by a guy who is almost 40.

Fourth, he hits on every single moderately attractive woman in the building.  Today he even gave one of the dealers his business card with his cell phone number on the back and said “call me when you get off work.”  This was right after he won a pot, and was in lieu of a tip. Evidently he felt that she needed his cell phone number more than she needed a buck.

As stated earlier, this guy plays a lot and thus I tangle with him quite a bit.

Recently (in fact it was the day he chose to berate my AK play) I open raised 77 in the CO, and he called on the button.  It appeared that he was unaware that I had raised and thus thought he was doing the initial raising.  The SB folded before he could change his action, so he had to just call.  The blinds folded and the flop came A98r.  I bet, and this guy now sprayed out a raise.  I highly suspected that he did not have an ace because he would make some slowplay with a hand like AK and wait for the turn to raise.  Plus, the way he put his chips into the pot just screamed BS to me.  I figured he had some dumb made hand that was still better than mine (J9s, T9s, etc) that he was going to attempt to show down cheaply by raising the flop, checking the turn and then calling any river bet.  So, I 3bet the flop with my 77, in an effort to get him to think I have an ace and thus fold his hand.  He thought for about 10 seconds and called.  The turn was a 5, giving me a gutshot that I hoped I wouldn’t need to hit.  I bet, he thought for 20 seconds, flashed his misplayed TT to the 4 players near him, and folded.  Once his hand was in the muck, I tabled my hand for all to see.

Normally I’d never show this bluff because I want to be able to steal pots like this at will, but given the opponent, a spite exception was made and the glorious 77 was tabled.