What a crazy story…

so i went down to the cardroom yesterday, excited to get some table time in. i haven’t played live in a few weeks, but i’ve been thinking about the game a lot lately. i felt pretty ready to play well.

one thing that you like to tell yourself is that you’ve played enough where there’s nothing that will surprise you. after all, i once flopped quad Q’s and ended up with the third best hand. i mean, once you’ve seen THAT, what else is there?

well, how about getting cheated in a poker game and getting the two colluders thrown out of the casino? yeah, that would be pretty new.

i had been playing in the 8-16 limit hold’em game, with a 1/2 kill. it was a pretty great game. lots of loose-passive players, giving action on every hand. a few hours in, two buddies sat down on either side of me. they were both relatively young, were both pretty loud, and they were clearly loose players. a few hands after they had chopped an enormous pot by both flopping a straight with 46 offsuit, they tried to cheat me out of a pot by putting me in the middle. they were both vietnamese and celebrated by speaking quickly in their native tongue (which is a big no-no at the table).

what does it mean to get ‘put in the middle’. well, in limit hold’em, oftentimes you’ll sit in a hand with a marginal strength and need to make a careful decision about how to proceed based on the actions of others. getting ‘put in the middle’ means getting stuck between two or more other players, who both show strength and perhaps raise/re-raise each other. cheaters will often get together with a buddy to specifically put a player in the middle of the two of them, raising and re-raising so that the player becomes convinced his hand can’t be good. still unclear what this means? read on:

i was under-the-gun with Ah6h. not exactly a strong hand, but the table had started to slow down since these two sat down. i raised to mix it up. buddy #2 to my left immediately called two bets, and buddy #1 was the only other caller from the big blind. fine. i figured i probably had a better hand than both anyway. the flop came Ts6c3d. no draws. buddy #1 immediately bet and i immediately raised. it was a ragged flop, and i wanted to know where i was right away. to my surprise, buddy #2 re-raised to three bets and buddy #1 capped it at four bets without hesitating. at this point i paused. i glanced over at both and saw them glancing at each other. huh? something was fishy. what hands could you possibly cap with here and not have re-raised before the flop (especially these two)? i called and buddy #2 called also. the turn came 4c and buddy #1 bet out. now at this point i was sure i was done, so i mucked and watched these two closely. something was very fishy. after some hemming and hawing, buddy #2 called.

the river came 3s, putting Ts6c3d4c3s on the board. at this point, to my amazement, both players checked and buddy #1 showed A2, an ace-high with no draw on the flop. i stood up quickly as buddy #2 started to put his cards into the muck. i said quickly to the dealer, “stop. i want to see both hands.” in a panic, buddy #2 tried to throw his cards into the muck, but the dealer grabbed them and turned them over: Qs8d.

so let’s recap: these two assholes clearly cheated me by teaming up to push me out of the pot. furious, i called the floorperson over. while buddies #1 and #2 tried to claim that they just “outplayed me”, their cards lay on the table face-up for everyone to see. the floorperson listened briefly to the recounting of the action and, to my surprise, immediately threw both of the buddies out.

crazy? yes. definitely.