I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this, mods feel free to delete or move. I read the rules and think this is the right spot but I could be wrong.

First a primer: I grinded online for a living right before Black Friday and was obsessed with poker. I used to post here under a different handle that I no longer have access too. I took a hiatus and and left my local scene while I got my career and income set about 6 years ago. Now due to some success I have a quite large roll to splash around with and I am looking to have some fun while testing myself. I'm in my early thirties.

I have a younger 27yr old roommate who I've just met this year thru mutual friends. He's annoying but holds up his ends for the most part so I can deal with him.

When I decided to start dipping my toes back in he became highly interested but this a story you know. He usually wins, and he is good at 'pot odds' and yada yada you get it. I tried to give him a couple simple tips to help him not light the money he doesn't have in the first place on fire but it was to no avail. Things like "don't make a bet without a plan, you should never be surprised by an opponents action. Bet your hand for value when you actually have a good holding because most people 'in your spot' min bet the whole way etc etc.

This all seems to fall on deaf ears and he just looks at my mouth and waits for it to stop moving so he can talk at me. I don't want to ramble but you get the idea. My question and reason for creating this thread is what would such like minded folk as yourselves do in this spot.

After enduring an ear beating during the entire 1 hour ride to our closest casino he hits me with "Last time I was here I hit the High Hand and it was great I left with a bunch of extra money!".

We make the hike to the poker room, we sit down, and he dusts off 80bb with K7o in the second hand (standard). I have to tell him to put his blinds in and when its is action every time. Then, during the second orbit, hes on the BTN and calls a raise from MP, JJA rainbow flop, bet call, brick turn check check, J river, villain checks roommate bets villain promptly folds.

Roommate does that thing where he looks at his cards before he mucks as the pots being pushed to him. He has Jx in his hand exposing it to me and the Asian rec on my left. I look at the screen, the HH is JJJJK, I look at the table/board/his hand and see JJJJA. Theres 20min left at 8am with only a handful of tables running.

I am always paying attention and even though things are moving fast I could've easily told him he had the high hand before he mucked.

What do you do here? Its all over and done with and is silly, but it's causing a lot of controversy/static with my other roommates because he owes them money. No matter what I'm giggling and my week is still gonna roll. I just want to gauge how the hive mind here would approach this.

I hope this isn't an awful belly flop back into 2p2 as I have a hand history I want to post as well.

I don't get why you wouldn't tell him? what do you gain by not telling him?

He would never tell me, and I guess this is the school I learned under. I have played props and smashed it on the end and just not been paying attention and missed them. IDK it just seems like if you're gonna talk all this talk about being awesome and knowing whats going on I shouldn't hold your hand. He told me he knew how the whole thing works.

never played at a casino where you didn't have to play both cards for high hand... what if board was jjjja??? does everyone at the table get high hand?

Hard Rock Hollywood is one where you can use one card. You can’t play the board for high hand, though.

OP, the reason you gave that you didn’t tell him seems really petty and if he would do the same to you I don’t understand why you’re friends at all.

This was at Mohegan, and honestly, they're really slow and running any promo they can and I think just a J in his hand here qualifies for what would be like, $1100 or something high hand. Regardless I'm more interested in peoples thoughts on the... etiquette/principal side of things as I will be dealing with a few younger people like this now that I'm getting back into things in my area. I guess this is poker/life advice thread in retrospect

I don't gain anything by telling him either. He's not going to give me any and it's not gonna grease any wheels. I probably wont see this person 2yrs from now.

But instead I waited until after he mucked to rub his nose in the fact that he's not as smart as he thinks he is. And now he's pissed at me! And now our other roommates are also pissed at me, because he owes them money, and all I had to do was say "Wait" and he would've won $1100.

You want to know what you gain by not speaking up before but telling him after? The feeling of superiority.

You really showed him. Aren't you happy now?

You have a better grasp of your relationship, the dynamics, the motives and potential gains of each party than we do. I can think of some people who I wouldn't make aware of their high hand, but then I wouldn't be riding with them to the casino and playing next to them. I wouldn't be acting like I care about improving their poker game. So it's a touch spot to imagine.

As a player/person, tell him if you want, don't if you don't. If you don't tell him, I wouldn't tell him later, or tell anyone else either, unless you're trying to be a douche. But that is up to you, and has nothing to do with poker.

If you do tell him, it's unclear if that will affect his eligibility to win it. Probably not, because he can always claim he had just figured it out himself when you told him. Even after he pitches his cards forwards, he can say he was about to grab them back on his own. So it probably doesn't affect that. But different jurisdictions might have different rules about it, so it depends on the jurisdiction (and who's working that day, probably).

As others have said above, this isn't really a rules question, it's more a personal ethics question. To make a tenuous connection, though, perhaps you're wondering if by telling him you are cheating other players in the room who might have a lesser chance to win (if it's a progressive jackpot, or only one winner per hour, or whatever). In that case, I guess there's a slight bias against telling him, but it's so slight IMO as not to matter.

There was a very easy way to handle this, but it seems you were more focused on teaching a lesson or pumping up your own credibility ... which is fine if you really wanted to go that route.

There is a growing trend that for a HH promo you only need to use one card from your hand to qualify. Still both/pp for BBJ though. One of our local casinos had a 'disastrous' promo that they quickly ended (after a -$25K weekend) where they left that out of the language and a table ended up getting paid $1000 per Player when the Dealer put a straight flush on the Board.

My solution, which would've allowed for you to both embarrass your 'friend' and still allow that money to be either put onto the table (for you to win) or perhaps pay off some house debt ....

"You can't just show me .. now you got to show everyone at the table."

No guarantee that he tables his hand, but now you'd have a whole table of experts either ripping him for mucking or not even knowing that he was going to win. GL

Sounds like a fish who you would want an extra 1100 in front of him.

I too woulda said something like “show one show all dude”, then if he says eff you you can really laugh.

He still has no idea and it wil remain that way until the other person I asked about this, leaks it to him or he finds out some other organic way. There's no feeling of superiority going on here. I'm going to be playing in games and interacting with people in the near future where this might continue to rise up. I just wanted to know what people thought about this. This was done to me, and I'm wondering if it's something I should do or not do. I like the fact that I pay attention now because people did this to me.

The word 'friend' in the title is misleading, it should read acquaintance or something.

Also he didn't show anyone. He looked at his cards but did it in a way that exposed them to me and the seat to my left. He had no intention of showing anyone.

This probably the best thing I could've done. Thank you very much this is insightful. Initially I was extending an olive branch with a sigh, but then most certainly was focused on teaching him a lesson after he just brushed the branch away.

This is a small derail:

• Mohegan Sun (at least the one in CT) requires a pocket pair for quads to qualify for the high hand at all times, so this time, no money was lost;
• High hands are never nearly this much money at this time (works out to ~$55/table/3-hour period, probably something like $200-300 in the 6-9am session without knowing what day it was; they haven't run a promo at 8am for.... as long as I can remember, and I've been a reg there for many years.)

Assuming this story is true:

You take $1100 off of your table and away from your roommate because you want to prove a point that you're more attentive than he is? Or you're a better poker player than he is?

Let me level with you: you aren't a good poker player, because only a truly foolish player would turn down an extra $1100 on the table or in the pocket of a bad player.

I really hope that you consider why you're behaving the way you are, because you're not doing yourself any favors by acting this way.

Or maybe I just try to treat the people around me with the respect and care that I'd like to be treated with, and in a way that allows me to know that I'm not making the world a worse place to live.

Couple things here. First, it seems like it would be a violation of OPTAH. No different if he was about to muck a winning hand at showdown. I can't imagine the vitriol from the guy who had JJJJK when you tell your neighbor to table his JJJJA.

Second, going off of the post a couple up, saying that at Mohegan you need to play 2 cards to win the HH, maybe your friend/acquaintance/roommate knew this all along and you didn't. Who has superiority in that case?

I'm pretty sure most rooms don't consider it violation of OPTAH. In every room I've played in it's perfectly acceptable and annoyingly common for every player at the table to ask if the winner has a high hand qualifier whenever one is possible on the board.

OPTAH doesn't apply after the hand is over and only one player has live cards.

Also at many rooms you be hh $s don’t have to stay in play.

why did you write a novel when you could have just wrote a few sentences to ask your question?

As another poster pointed out there are a lot of dynamics here that weren't laid out in the OP, I didn't want to write a wall of text but I guess I should have considering how salty some people in here are.

There is 0 incentive to lie about this, at least I can' think of one. I also never said I was a good poker player or better than anyone else. I enjoy poker, I always gravitate towards it and I find lessons learned in it can applied to other facets of life, many parallels for me. I do not play poker to make money, I play poker because I enjoy the feeling of understanding and ideas make me high. I like to make more correct decisions than incorrect ones using all available information.

As I stated in an earlier reply this is a mutual acquaintance and the word friend should be totally disregarded. The back story is this guy is from our area and is friends with my good friend and roommate from his middle school/high school days or something, I hadn't met the dude up until like Dec 1st. The short story is he moved out to Cali a year or two ago, put all his eggs in one basket and things went awry. Things could be worse for him but he is still in a jam and has 0 to little funds. Now this is a house all about helping as we're all around this age and just starting to get things figured out. The problems start to arise when he starts trying to pull fast ones us with things that involve money. I won't go into the specifics but hes the kinda dude where when you give an inch he attempts to take a mile if he sees the opportunity but doesn't try to hard. It's at the point though where he knows we know these things but we've never said them out loud. The three long time roommates are all cool with tolerating him for the next two months until our lease is up and the three of us head to our new place and he does whatever. We do complain to each other quite a bit.

I don't want this to spin out into minutia anymore than it has but it boils down to we get hes in a jam and we are helping him by giving him a room for cheap and driving him around as he has no vehicle (here or west coast). He's become rather discouraged lately because as I've said we don't really give him inches anymore and he's not really doing anything for himself. I hope I'm not coming of as self righteous here because my life is a disaster zone, I'm just in an upswing right now.

Now whether or not his hand qualified for the high hand at Mohegan is irrelevant. The guy next to me certainly thought it qualified as did the rest of the table when he brought it up while dude was away from the table. Also from what I remember about mohegan you get a slip and it doesn't get put on the table, this might have changed though. The whole situation with him right now is....icky for everyone involved. I guess I should've made this clearer. I see a lot of myself in him when I was younger and like I said, this is the exact kind of thing that was done to me by the people around me. I don't need a lecture or shaming about the type of person I am. I'll end by saying the money is irrelevant and I find it horribly disgusting. I can't stand the stuff. I cover my basic needs to keep me breathing and happy (which is simple and cheap for me, so a lot to me is not a lot to most people) and I hemorrhage the rest on purpose. You wan't me in your poker game right now.

TLDR;

The dude has actively tried to take money out of our pockets without us noticing and has been taking every advantage he can in the recent past because of a pickle he is in. There's little guarantee that if he was to score this $1100 that all would end up in the hands of those who are owed if any, imo. I believe I am helping him by not helping him in this spot. 'maybe if I wasn't being so sneaky and shady, people would want to help me' An $1100 sting is not going to hurt myself or anyone else but this person, and it's all a 'principal' thing to others parties involved. I am horrible at poker.

If I had to tell him it was his action and was his BB and SB every single hand, what is the likely hood of this?

This is a horrible, horrible habit of mine. Unfortunately it kind of pays dividends in my professional career as a full stack dev. I write documentation that I wish other people did.

These are things I don't know because I don't care at about the HH and this what the people at the table where saying. Pretty much everyone else was 45+