The Poker Grafter

I was recently knocked out of a multi-table tournament when my 1010 got called by a conservative player holding 7-2o. The call was a ludicrous one and as I prepared to put my head in the oven the player in question apologised. Apparently she was trying to lose her chips because her young daughter had got up sick in the night and she needed to look after her. What can you say to that? It’s disheartening to lose at the best of times but to be beaten by someone who wants to be eliminated…that’s hard to take and could only happen in poker. Shortly after I believe her daughter felt better and she was grateful for her healthy chip stack. What a lovely end to the story.

That player’s apology and explanation was so bizarre I had to laugh but the online etiquette for bad beats is a delicate area. I used to feel that it was just good manners to apologise for a particularly nasty bad beat. But experience has shown me that the epitaph of ’sorry’ is just as likely to provoke the wounded beast; a typical blunt response being ‘no you’re not.’ Well yes, obviously I’m glad about my new bulging chip stack. But I can still be sympathetic to the manner of your losing at the same time.

In one common scenario if we’re both all-in pre-flop and I have KK and you have AA and I miraculously outdraw, I’m certainly not apologising for my play. In an online tournament where time is of the essence I believe KK has to be played as strongly as AA 99 times out of 100. In many respects to lose w KK to AA is almost as unlucky as the reversal, but of course you won’t hear the guy with rockets apologising, and rightly so.

If however a complete bluff turns into a winning hand once the chips are in and the cards are turned over that’s a slightly different matter. A sense of guilt and embarrassment may make a player even more inclined to apologise but let’s be honest the meek little ’sorry’ is very unlikely to be warmly received by the victim in this circumstance. My advice, just say nothing.

Another common online courtesy is ‘unlucky’ (ul). The hot-headed victim will even take this as incitement if uttered at the wrong moment. ‘Of course it was!’ (Add expletives at will). Equally the normally convivial ‘good game’ (gg) may well be met with the stroppy ‘no it **** wasn’t.’ In short, some players are just so unable to take a bad beat that there is literally nothing you can say to appease them. So say nothing… then wait to get abused for not even apologising. You can’t win.

But perhaps the hot-headed bad loser should note the typical response of most top players in the world to cruel misfortune. They get bad beat for $100k, shake their heads in frustration and walk away quietly with their dignity intact. An integral part of playing poker seriously is learning to cope with the game’s frequent injustices. I feel that coping with the emotional side of poker is possibly the biggest improvement my game has seen in the past two years. If you can’t handle frequently losing with the best hand, don’t play.

Of course some players don’t even have to be unfortunate to feel aggrieved. I remember one memorable occasion when an opponent went mad at me because I called with the best hand too quickly. I had AA and the flop came Q-Q-10, at which point my emotional adversary quickly moved all-in. I quickly decided that I still had the best of things and called almost instantly. He turned over K-K and I knocked him out. He was furious that I’d been so disrespectful and naïve. Apparently I should have realised that he was representing a Queen and therefore folded, or at the very least agonised over the decision to call. Of course it occurred to me that he could hold a Queen but I concluded instinctively and instantly that this wasn’t the case. The fact is that when you play all the time you can make quite difficult decisions very quickly, rightly or wrongly. I found it hilarious that a player could be so enraged by an opponent calling with what was the best hand at every stage. Oh the injustice of it all.

Simon Ballou writes for Oddschecker Poker