Shut Up and Take My Money!!

Well it's been about two months since I left my job, and I have to say that the time has been significantly less eventful than I envisioned it.  I literally spent an entire week cleaning my house and trying to "get my life organized" and shortly after that I found myself more bored than I could ever remember being, at a time when all of my friends were at work.  I tried picking up new shows on Netflix, but I guess I'm just not much of a TV guy because I haven't watched any in a little over a month.  I also joined the YMCA and started taking Pilates classes with the stay-at-home moms and retired women who frequent the Y in the middle of the day.  Let's just say my presence is a little bit of an anomaly.

So after a week or so of amazingly relaxing boredom, I finally decided to start thinking about the reason I left my job in the first place, and started to put in 20ish hours a week at Foxwooods on top of 20ish hours a week of at-home study.  The initial results have been a bit of a roller coaster but the details are rather boring so today I'm going to share a fun story instead.

I was getting toward the end of a 6-hour $1/$2 No Limit cash game session that had been relatively uneventful up to this point.  I think I had built up about a $75-$100 profit, and the other players at the table had been pretty quiet throughout the session.  I was planning on leaving in about 15-minutes when a new player was seated at the table.  He was a short, thin guy with a kind of ragged looking white t-shirt and a gold chain, and he sat down with $300.  Over the next 5-10 hands he quickly lost his entire stack by implementing a strategy of calling literally every single bet regardless of size and regardless of how weak his cards were.  He was determined to make this strategy work, however, as he wasted no time in pulling out another $300 to put down on the table.

So needless to say, I quickly changed my original plan of leaving in 15-minutes.  I was staying at the table until this new guy left or I went broke.  We were there for another 30-45 minutes, and during that time our new table friend lost his stack 2-3 more times and bought back in each time.  So far I hadn't had a chance to play a hand vs. him, but after waiting patiently I finally found my chance.  I won't go into the boring details of the hand, but long story short, I managed to take a $125 chunk out of his stack.

Now this is where things started to get interesting.  At the end of each hand, our new friend had a habit of picking up his cards to look at them in a way that exposed the cards to the players seated near him.  This was never a major issue, because he only ever did this when the players sitting near him were out of the hand, but it was still revealing a lot of information about his holdings to some players that the rest of the players at the table didn't have access to.  It didn't bother me too much, as it was pretty obvious that his cards were garbage the majority of the time, but the player to my left had had enough by the time this hand was over.

So after this particular hand between myself and our new friend, he picked up his cards to look at them, exposed them to his neighbors, and the player to my left demanded to see what they were.  Rather than show him, he threw the cards into the muck and insisted that it didn't matter.  This pissed off the player to my left, but he was mostly upset with the dealer for allowing this behavior to continue for as long as it had.  After a bit of an argument, the floor was eventually called over to settle the dispute.  For all of you non-poker readers, the "floor" is the term used for the poker room supervisors.  One of their responsibilities is to settle disputes whenever they come up, which is a pretty common thing in live poker games.

So they came over, and our new friend started to get visibly upset about the situation.  After a little more arguing he finally stood up and announced that he was leaving.  He had about $150 left on the table, and rather than take it he said "I don't fucking care about this, I'm rich, I don't need this".  He then took the $150 stack and pushed it in front of the woman seated beside him and told her to keep it.  The floor told him that he can't give money to another player at the table, so he responded by asking "where do you want me to leave it then?  I can leave it on the floor, I can leave it on this chair, but I'm not taking it with me."  They quickly realized that he was actually serious about this so they basically turned away and let him hand the money to his neighbor.  She was kind of in shock at this point and was afraid to touch the money, but I'm pretty sure she warmed up to it pretty quickly.