We’ve all encountered him at one time or another on the virtual felt. He joins the table with a short buy, enters every pot with a raise then when he loses the hand, he fills the chat-box with a tirade of insults meant to reduce you to a soup of the pond scum he thinks you are.
“what a donkey… u r an idiot… calling my ep pf raise with ak off?? nice catch a**hole motherf*****!”
The table pig. The online rooms are rife with them and, if you’re like me, you’ve wondered just who are these oinkers?
My latest Riverwind session answered that (seemingly) rhetorical question. Late in the evening, he sat at my table. Seat nine.
He’s a big fella – meaty in the way a body builder is meaty after being away from the gym and the steroids for a couple of years. He has a ragged goatee and sports a sweat stained ball cap. On the right arm is a bold, black tattoo that says “Baby” in curly-cue script, on the other, a big star.
He buys in short and comes in with the expected raises on every hand. Folding is not in his repertoire. When he loses pot after pot, a steady breeze of under-the-breath invectives wafts over the table.
“You were only 17% on that hand and you called. Nice catch, idiot.”
The guy on my right is an affable sort. He ‘s not a brilliant player, but he’s had a good little rush and is up about six hundred dollars. He takes the insult in stride, smiling it off saying “You’re right, I didn’t know I was 17% on that hand. I just played it the way I know how.”
Our bag of pork-rinds decides to go uber-aggressive and pushes in the dark. He gets called by pocket aces and draws out – trip kings for the suckout.
A few hands later, I go head to head with him. He does it again, pushes in the dark. I take another look at my cards to be sure they are the pocket queens I think they are, and exclaim “I call.” He stands up and proclaims “If you have aces you beat me, if you have kings you beat me,” I wait for the next statement. “If you have queens you have me beat.”
I flip over my queens. He flips over his jacks. I wince and say “You’ll hit your jack. I know you will.” It’s my way of dispelling the bad juju. Incredibly (!), my hand holds up. It not only holds up – I flop quads. Karma. I bust the table pig. He doesn’t rebuy. He departs with attitude, making me doubt for a second that I’d actually had the best hand from start to finish.
He disappears in a blip, just like his online counterpart. I think I catch of whiff of bacon in his wake.