It is one of the attributes of youth. Joe Speaker sees it in his son and blogs about it. Even those of us with hair in more places can revert to youthful exuberance. Yes, I do it from time to time myself. Humans seem to revert to optimism in a default manner that force reeducates us once again. It is a poker table standard, too, it seems.End a session and sit at the bar or hit IM with your tale and a staple is ‘The Big Fold’ the we or our opponent made. They can become the stuff of legend or the highlight from two hours of WPT editing. Intellect triumphs over our normal optimism. All to often what is exposed is our human fraility.
At no-limit it is the deceptive bet that pulls us in with a misread. At limit is happily putting in the 4th raise. Or letting the rounds cap and cap without the nuts. We let one hand define our session. When we come out on top, it’s one of those ultimate joys.
In the flop games it is a fairly simple process to determine the nut hand. Much of the complaining is the great starting hand that didn’t make one much money. The other side of that is the demigod like non-nut that occasionally loses a big pot. If we’re lucky, it happens on a one outer on the river. But, often the guy had it when we blundered. Yeah, maybe we were unlucky. But, it is dangerous to let a hand define our session with just a ‘nice’ hand.
At the stud games, things aren’t as clear. It isn’t hard to have a concealed hand People may think you are betting what your ups represent and you have a completely different hand. When three down cards play at the end, it is often the sign of a loose player. But the pot odds can make that as righteous as any other call. Or the outs were enough and more.
I watched (fortunately) such a hand yesterday. Four players capped on 4th street. They did it again on 5th and in lost a player doing it on 6th. After capping the last street, the hands were displayed:
- Quad Jacks
- Flush
- Full-House
Now I’ve had all three of the above hands and been beat in all three. Yes, I’ve had my quads go down in flames. After the hand above, I typed in something like:
Craziest hand I ever saw was live at $15/30 LHE (Bellagio). I was out of the hand in the 1s, and the 2s, 3s, and 4s capped the flop of 8-7-2 rainbow, 8 on turn brought another cap (with the 3s calling between the raisers) then 7 on the river getting all of the 2s’s money in and the 3s called the second or third bet (it’s been a couple years…). 2s had 77, 3s had 22, and 4s had 88. The best hand stayed ahead the whole time.