Well, yesterday was a $220 local hold'em tournament. Nice venue, however there were a few people there that I could do without. There was 1 incident that really pissed me off, and 1 incident that kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.
The incident that pissed me off was about a house rule that someone took advantage of. This guy (who is well known in the local circles, and is a bit on the abrasive side) was mulling over weather to call a big bet or not. He then asked the really nice guy in the hand with him, "If I fold, will you show me?" The nice guy said "I will show you 1 card." The gut then said "OK, 1 card." He then folded. The nice guy did what he said and showed the abrasive guy 1 card. The abrasive guy then call "house" over to the table. Then proceeded to tell the nice guy that the house rule was, if you show 1 card you must show both. So the abrasive guy knew that but pulled (in my opinion) a very classless and rude stunt. Then this person decided to lecture the table about "poker is a game of lying, deceit, and manipulation, and winning at all costs." It just disgusted me.
Then the incident that left a bad taste in my mouth, really surprised me because it was one of the most respected players I play with. Now it is clearly up to interpretation weather what they did was cool or not, however, I am clearly in the "not cool" camp. Before I get to the "bad taste" I must explain my philosophy and where I come from.
Like I discussed before, I long ago gave up any notion of playing poker for a living. As have most of my good poker friends and acquaintances. So I play for fun and to make a few extra $$. So when I play in a tournament, and we get down to a few people left, and we can all triple or quadruple our buy-in, I will usually chop. Why? Let me put it this way, sure, we could play down to the last 4 people and they can get paid 2.5k for 1st, 1.5k for 2nd and 700 for 3rd and 300 for 4th. So only the top 3 people feel like real winners. Now since most aren't playing for a living, why not chop it 6 ways? Everyone would make $850 and instead of 3 people feeling like winners, 6 people would. I mean, everyone slogs to work and eats (figuratively) a certain about of shit every day. They play poker to kind of relax, and escape the riggors of their life. So why not (since we are not playing for a living) make 6 people feel like winners? Especially when you play with these folks regularly, and we are not talking about life changing money.
That is pretty much what happened. This 1 person refused to make any sort of deal. Then someone suggested when there was 6 people left, why don't we give everyone their $200 buy-in back and play for the rest, and again this same well respected person said "no".
Like I said before, many will dissagree with my philosiphy.
Regarding the tournament, I got my buy in back, but did not win it. It went on so long (9 hours) that towards the end, I just wanted to go home.
After a day of thinking about this stuff, there is 1 thing I did not consider. I did not consider the histories the other players at the table had with each other. There may have been dynamics at play that I never considered, or possibly even bad blood.
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