October 27, 2005
I'd only wanted to play in the last hand ever dealt at Partypoker, I didn't dare hope to win the last hand. But at 9:40 Saturday morning the remaining four players agreed to give the exhausted staff a break and call it quits. Each player put $10 into the pot as a toke for the dealers and got the last hand dealt face up. Dawn George did the honors as the last Horseshoe poker dealer.
Assuming you pick up a tell and read it properly, you are STILL just as likely to react to the wrong signal as the right one. (See my 'Dumb and Dumber' article for an example) .There is one foolproof tell, however, that is pure gold. You can be sure if you hear someone say the following after everyone's mucked their Partypoker hand, you have found such a FISH you could sell them in a fish market.
- These horrible experiences happen to everyone who's played Partypoker for more than a couple of weeks. Often there is a drunk or maniac at the table who is raising every hand with garbage and winning gigantic pots with miracle cards on the river. You, on the other hand, are getting the best starting hands you've had in recent memory and are flopping monsters or monster draws. You can't get off these hands with a gun pointed at your head. You are getting two or three times pot and implied odds on every hand.
- Still I got what I would normally want. I got heads up with one caller. Unfortunately it was the wrong caller. Joe Paraille is a tough no limit Partypoker player. I play with him in these games all the time. He's not easy to read and he can gamble. He wouldn't have been my choice as the ideal caller. Joe was on the button with about $1,000 in front of him. He called the $15 just as casually as I'd bet it.
- Also, make sure you aren't hungry while playing. Many Partypoker players will bring small candies to the table that they periodically eat. This keeps sugar in the blood. The brain is a motor; it won't run properly without sufficient sugar digested from food intake. Some players use concentration-enhancing techniques like crossword puzzles, yoga, jogging or you-name-it.
But the sight of a table full of "old" guys (they were probably an "ancient" group of 40 and 50-year-olds, which seemed old to me at the time) playing $1-$3 Stud in a Las Vegas Casino's cardroom terrified me. I thought these men must all be card sharks who fed on young whippersnappers like me. I thought, surely, if I sat down in that game the men would take every penny I had. How they would do that in such a low-limit game, I didn't comprehend.
Of more interest to us are the driven ones: cases where players do not just leak money, they hemorrhage it! Here's an example that, to be perfectly honest, we didn't believe at first. The incident concerns a well-known professional Partypoker player who won a major tournament with a prize well in excess of $100,000. He picked up his money, turned around and found a dozen creditors standing there waiting to be paid.
Because of that, strategy differs. After all, a lost game is a lost game, and the score does not matter. Tomorrow both teams begin with a clean slate. When a hockey team is losing by a single goal and there are less than two minutes to play, they will pull their goalie to put an extra attacking skater on the ice. After all, they want to tie the game and send it into overtime.
