Recently a friend of mine was playing $300/$600 at Commerce when a situation arose that is so ridiculous that it cannot be fabricated and also provides further evidence of why I don’t need to work for a living.
A few people limp into the pot and someone raises, a professional poker player folds, the blinds call and now the first limper 3bets because he’s awful and the initial raiser caps. When the professional poker player who folded sees this 6 handed capped pot brewing he says, “Whoa, Let me have my hand back.” (Everyone else in the game was in the pot, so his cards were the only ones in the muck and thus easily identified.) My friend, being the sharp tack that he is, immediately yells “Time” and gets the action stopped. My buddy knows that this guy is fixing to do something really stupid, and wants to facilitate this stupidity in any way possible. He says to the pro, “We’ll let you take your hand back, but you’ve got to put in 15 chips instead of 12.” The pro agrees.
The hand that he presumably didn’t view to be worth $600 (since he folded it the first time he had the chance to play it) he now suddenly feels is worth $1,500 to the $1,200 of everyone else. He could have put in $600 to the $600 of everyone else not 17 seconds earlier, but opted instead for the even less desirable 1500/1200 ratio. Let’s play it for more money but for worse odds. That makes sense.
Not surprisingly, this 20+ year “professional” was later heard saying, “It’s just not as easy to get money as it used to be”, as he bemoaned his trouble in drumming up a stake.
Some of the stupidest people in the world play poker.