9 December 2005

Part of poker is deceit. You misrepresent your cards, your reads of other players’ cards, your knowledge of their strategies and tells. Poker is really just an advanced form of lying.

A nicer way of putting that is to say that you are acting, and the greatest actor at our game is Ivan, poker player deluxe and designer/programmer of this here website. Sometimes Ivan will make a great hand and have to make such an obvious call that there’s no real decision to be made; it’s an automatic, but Ivan will go into this little performance where he’s acting as if there are many variables to be taken into account and he’s running through the various scenarios.

Now, we all know that Ivan is a master of trickery, so nobody ever believes a word he says. In fact, a few months ago, in a paraphrase of film reviewer Charles Taylor, I said that if Ivan said that it was raining that I’d have to go outside and get wet before I believed him. So, while he’s acting, I’ll start saying stuff like, “Okay, De Niro, show us your boat (a full house).” If Ivan is really hamming it up, I’ll call him Pacino (because Pacino’s default mode for at least the last twelve years is to pander and coast and go broad and obvious [though he was pretty good in Donnie Brasco.])

So Pacino, uh, I mean Ivan, is holding 10-9 off suit and flops the 10-10-10-9-9 boat. It’s a miraculous flop because only face cards or running nines (both pretty unlikely occurrences) can hurt him. Still when Jesse bets it up, Ivan calls for time and takes a long time making a decision, as if he hadn't just flopped a giant money-maker. Finally, after great deliberation, Ivan calls.

You need to know that Jesse is a really aggressive player, and if he thinks that he’s spotted weakness and/or uncertainty, he’ll beat and beat on you with big bets until your sad little heart feels pulverized. But, judo-style, Jessie’s momentum can be used against him when an opponent has made a real throat-slitter of a hand, which Ivan had most certainly done.

After the turn, a card that can’t hurt Ivan, Jessie bets the maximum and Ivan again hesitates as he calls. The river is another rag, and when Jesse bets this time, Ivan re-raises. Jesse’s bet so much into the pot that he’s pot-committed, so, even though it’s pretty clear to him and the rest of us that he just got conned by Ivan, he has to call.

Ivan turns over his tens-full-of-nines boat and rakes in the giant pot. It was at this point that we all start capping on Ivan. It’s a miracle that Jessie, who’s a big dude, didn’t beat Ivan into sweet unconsciousness with the chip case.

Even with all the chicanery going on at the table, Big Daddy (that’s me) managed to make $98.75, which brought my year-to-date total up to $968.75. It had seemed doubtful after the last few games that I still had a chance at making the grand that I had been chasing all year, but now I was $31.25 from being up $1,000 for 2005.