An Open Letter to all you Knuckleheads

I have determined the worst thing about playing poker.

The smoke-filled poker rooms? No.
Casino food? Nope.
Stumbling back into work Friday morning? You’re getting colder.

It’s listening to you rubes tell me bad beat stories. And it’s no contest.

“….so only two cards could beat me and guess what came on the river? No, guess!”

(Dammit. Not again.) “OK. One of those two cards?”

“Yes! Can you believe it!? Then I had pocket Jacks in middle position…..” You’ve started waving your hands around describing the post-flop betting and I’m wondering if I can render myself unconscious by hitting my head on the padded table edge since the wall is a solid 2 second run away.

Why can you people not sense VIOLENT DISINTEREST in the story that you’re telling?

Seriously; pay attention. This is important. Unless the story ends with a deer running through the poker room or a female member of the wait staff stripping on a 3-6 table while the dealer mistakenly mucks your cards, I have heard it before. In triplicate. These stories have all the interest of “I rolled the dice 6 times and guess what happened once?! A six! That’s right! What are the odds of that?!” Except the story that you tell me is three minutes long and I’m expected to pay attention the whole time and nod accordingly with a furrowed brow.

Without question the worst part is when you inevitably get halfway through the story and realize something doesn’t make sense. “No wait, I couldn’t have been in late position....” or “Wait a minute…oh yeah, I had queen-TEN. I’ll start over.”

BRUTAL. “Can I just give you the $250 instead?”

My favorite one from this weekend was a story about a guy's KJ "getting cracked" (YES, GETTING CRACKED) by AQ on a KQQ board. How is that getting cracked?!? Can KJ even GET cracked?!? I'm speechless.

When you guys are telling me these stories you want me to be thinking “THAT’S OUTRAGEOUS!” or “HOW COULD HE CALL THAT?!”

I’m actually thinking SUCKER PUNCH.

I’m wondering if I can sneak in a right cross the next time you blink and flee the scene. Or instead of fleeing I may try “DUDE; METEOR! ARE YOU OK?!” I'm still working out the details. I doubt my odds at getting away with this are very good. I’m estimating they are the about the same as hitting a gutshot on the turn. But I’VE HIT GUTSHOTS ON THE TURN BEFORE.

Maybe that’s how Spock came up with that neck-pinch thing. Anyone know if Kirk was a 20-40 player?

As a result of all this, I have stopped asking all of you how you’re doing that day or how your month is running. This is because when I do the question you provide an answer to is “Have any totally normal and statistically unavoidable events happened recently that have caused you to lose more than seventy-five dollars? If so, I would like to hear about as many of them as you have time for.”

I have however, developed a non-violent strategy that I will be using against you effective immediately. When you start up with “…like earlier, I had Ace-King,” I will stop you with “...I need a dollar to listen to your bad beat story.” Kind of like bad-beat story countermeasures. A preemptive strike if you will. And it’s four for four so far. No one had paid me but I reduced the number of stories I had to hear by four. I defy anyone to do better.

I think we’ve made progress here. In return, I promise not to tell my own bad beat stories, except for my own version of bad-beat stories which are actually stories about YOU telling ME bad-beat stories:

“So I'm in the restroom and guess who walks in? George! He starts to tell his Ace-Queen suited story to Bill while I’m trying to sneak back to the poker room and Bill’s cell phone rings. So George grabs me by the arm and tells the story to me instead!"

"What are the odds of that?! No really, what do you think the odds are of that?!”

Leave your scathing comments below; I plan on ignoring them.