Run Ins With a "Poker Pro" - My Experience
NOTE - This story is not in any way meant to attack any one person or poker pros in general. It is merely an experience I had playing with poker professionals in the past.
A Florida Poker Room, Winter 2014.
It had been a year since I had been in any meaningful relationship. I had finished selling off all of my nursery stock a few months back and had a nice nest egg tucked in, finishing up a BS degree while still living with Jenny at the time. I had considered the idea of playing poker full time, but knew I couldn't come to that decision for a number of months of really putting time in. 2013 was a roller coaster poker-wise - I had run like God for the first half, and the second half was "dust", as Mike would always say. I wasn't putting in the real time required to see if I could really make the money I wanted as well as handle the swings, barely rolled for 2-5 and 5-5 PLO games. It was Thursday night in season, the best night besides the weekend, but for some reason it was just not that busy. I walked in to find no PLO running and an interest list in the 2-5 game. I didn't drive 30 minutes to turn around and go home, so I put my name on the 2-5 game, and within 10 minutes the game started as I found out soon why there were no higher stakes running.
My friend Skip walked by from a table in the back of the room and I asked him what he was playing.
"It's the WSOP Main Event seats, we have a sit-n-go every Thursday. Wanna join? We need more players."
He proceeded to explain that with an initial $1500 buy in, and $60 each Thursday, they played it out to see who would be staked for the main event, and everyone got a share of any winnings. I was not a tournament player and the Main Event wasn't of that much interest to me, so I declined. I did see that a number of pros were in the group, and figured I was dead money anyway. I was also surprised that this group wasn't just putting up $10K each, as many certainly lived a life that was typical of someone who had that kind of money. Then again, I wasn't a tournament pro so what did I know?
It started out 7-handed, as one player was sitting out but had a stack of $350 in a triangle with the extra 50 in red on the top. I noticed a few familiar faces on the table including a few regular Asian businessmen as well as a South African acquaintance. Both she and her father played regularly and she was a nice person, but was a big fan of flaunting her father's money and was relatively new to the 2-5 world. She was a social butterfly, making "friends" with most players at the room, and as I was in the SB, she was on the button and straddled to 10, and first to act I had picked up A
Q
and made it 45, and it folded around to the cutoff, who had now taken a seat at the table with her 350 stack and proceeded to make it 90. At the point she put the chips out, she had just realized it was a straddled pot and had minraised. She laid her head up against her arm resting on the whole table as if she had no interest in the game or making any effort to lift or move anything. She appeared very disinterested in the whole game, looking over at the sit-n-go, running over to some guy every other hand. Normally if I get minraised by many types of characters I think it's either AA or just a button clicker messing around, but she had wanted to make a legit 3-bet, so with that info I just stuck in a stack of green and she snap called and turned over her 8
8
like it was the nuts. As a red Ace hit the board as the window card, she was already out of her chair and halfway back to her boyfriend. I took it on myself to slide the stacks of red over myself as she went to see him and talk about "some donkey who wanted to get in 70BBs with ace queen". I guess she still had it in her head that it was not a straddled pot. As she brought back 500 to buy in with that clearly wasn't in her possession before, the South African proceeded to say to me, "well I guess I don't need to introduce you to my friend (who I will refer to as Mrs. Smiley), you guys seem to know each other!"
"I don't know this guy, I don't play at this place really at all!" Smiley said this in a tone that inferred this was a place not worth playing in, either due to the lesser action or just being on tilt and taking it out on the establishment.
"So you don't remember me as that crazy PLO guy?" As I said this, she seemed to remember who I was, and the fact that we had played at Hard Rock on a semi-regular basis for at least a year before this.