Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Crap! And Other Thoughts

So the last 2 days I got killed at the tables, relatively speaking. I lost my tiny stack when I brilliantly check-raised a guy on the turn when he was drawing to an open-ended straight. And a club wouldn't help because that would make my flush, giving him just six measly outs. He caught the eight of spades and busted me.

Drat. Then after flopping top two with K-10 I again check-raise on the turn like a champ and get called by A-10. He hits his ace and I have to ship my stack. In an SNG me and another dude are the big chip leaders, he raises way up there and I re-raise with queens. He calls, the flop comes Jack-high and I push. He thinks...and calls. With pocket tens. Which is my favorite hand, by the way, no way I'm losing to pocket tens, not when it's a two-outer...whoops, there's the ten on the river. Pocket tens, what a floozy, she'll dance with anyone.

So that pretty much sucked. But I can't complain too much, I played each hand well, made the other guy put in his chips with far the worst of it, and lost all three times. Oh well, that's poker. No big deal. I mean, I now know that God hates me, but, oh well.

Saturday night I was a bit under the weather and perhaps I shouldn't have been playing. Because I started having this weird internal conversation about which suits in a four-color deck look best together. For example, I had the four of diamonds and the four of spades, and the blue-black combo looked fierce and menacing to my eyes. But when I held the nine of clubs and nine of hearts, the hand looked weak and vulnerable. When your thoughts start heading down paths like that it's probably time to have a lie down.

I'm a bit frustrated at the lack of inspired trash-talking and insults I've found at the low-limit tables. For example--on the button I'm dealt the Hammer, and I raise, chasing out all but one caller. The flop comes 2-2-3--very nice. I check, luring the prey into my web, but he also checks. The turn is a King...come on, you have a king, dontcha? I check, he checks. The river is the friggin' case deuce. I've made quads with the Hammer and there's no one to see. Now, what should I do here? Bet the pot? Big frickin' deal, there's no money in that. He's gonna fold if I put a dime (literally) in. So I pushed with my entire stack, out of spite. And the guy thinks about it...thinks about it...thinks about it...and folds. Tease.

As the pot comes my way I turn over my cards, just to show that I have a sense of humor. A player who wasn't even in the hand types "idiot". Oh please, that's all you could come up with? Obviously my play was pure farce, can't you appreciate it? Or, if not, can't you come up with something better than "idiot"? I replied that any time he wanted to play heads up for FIVE BUCKS I'd kick his behind. Again, farce. He went bonkers, saying that he plays for more money than I've even seen and that he'd destroy me and that the Steelers cheated to win the Super Bowl. And then he called me an idiot again. Sigh, there's no love of language in the world today.

Further evidence of this came as I watched the Gonzaga-Loyola Marymount game last night. Gonzaga beat San Diego the night before and a player from SD said that Adam Morrison said something along the lines of "if a train ran over you and you died I wouldn't care". Now, because Morrison is tall and can shoot and has a cheesy mustache, many observers compare him to Larry Bird. Of course this is ludicrous--beating up on the WCC hardly means this guy is the Second Coming of Larry Legend. Bird was famous for giving his opponents the verbal needle, and perhaps Morrison was trying to further emulate the Celtic great. Well, so far as trash-talk goes, this is pathetic. A guy on the court tells me he wouldn't care if I died, I say something back like, "Wow, that hurts, really. Here come the tears...any second now...". Or, perhaps, "Really? That's strange, because after I finished rear-ending your mom last night down at the bus station she said that you're hoping I'll ask you to go camping on Brokeback Mountain."

It takes so little effort to insult another person's entire belief system, so why do so few people take the time? Especially when the other person isn't armed. One of my favorite off-the-cuff insults came in the Woody Allen film Love and Death. Allen plays a Russian soldier during the Napoleonic War (it's funnier than it sounds) and his unit arrives to find the battlefield covered with Russian dead.

The soldier next to Allen points to a corpse and says, "That man was from my village. He was the village idiot."

And Woody says, "What'd you do, place?"

BG will get that, anyway.

posted by Gene @ 12:32 PM   |