Spinning at the WSOP

“Intelligence gets me there.  Stupidity takes me out” - Andy Black

As you stroll the hallways of the Rio at the WSOP, you hear snippets of everyone’s bad beat stories.  Like one disjointed run on sentence it goes something like this: “What did he think I was raising with UTG…so I flopped top two pair…I flopped the nut flush and the bastard runner runnered me with…the asshole calls me with 9 friggin’ 3 offsuit…” and so on.  So it was like a breath of fresh air (well other than we were both outside having a smoke) that I ran into Andy Black yesterday.  Andy cashed deep in the Pot Limit Omaha; finishing 11th for $43,365.  I asked him how his WSOP was going.

He said other than his PLO performance, he had made it deep in a number of events without cashing.  As he ticked them off he said things like “and then I fucked up” or “I played badly when we got close to the money.”  I told him he needed a better spin.  He smiled wryly and gave the quote at the top of the post.  While Black’s humility is something of an anomoly in the poker world, I have to say that I hear very few pros mention a hand or a bust out in terms of a bad beat.  To the pros that do this day in and day out - seeing literally hundreds of hands a day - what we consider a bad beat holds little relevance to them.  For us, cracked aces or a flopped set that fails to win, defines our events.  For most pros, their play defines them.    

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.