Altercations at the table
Feel free to share any and all encounters with A holes at the table and how you shut them up or otherwise handled it.
^ He woke up the next day thinking - that little nerdy guy throws punches that are like bricks to the face!
i'm not much of a fight sports watcher but i'd watch a fight between the crazy chest slapper and the drunk face planter.
10 or 11 years ago I was 18 (not USA) and loved to show bad bluffs that worked from time to time.
I made a big guy fold a hand and as I showed him the cards he said ''I'll get ya outside you ****ing moron, thinking you're cool''. My answer was that showing a bluff was fun and he could do it to me as well, after that he calmed down and game resumed. He eventually gets dealt pair of aces which get cracked by a set of mine and he storms out of the table saying we'd see each other later.
I continued my session and could always see him pushing down buttons on mega tilt from my table. I thought ''I hope he's not waiting for me to leave''.
Anyway after about an hour I leave the casino and I as I'm walking by the exit at 4am the f***ng donk confronts me with a knife and tells me to give him the money he lost on that hand (around 200USD). I give him 200 bucks, he takes them, says nothing and walks away without significant haste. I still was 2 BI up and went to the bus stop to get home. I learned that night that knife>set.
At a 2/5 NLHE game at commerce, a guy shoves over my pot sized river bet (a out 3x pot) and then says 'the last few dollars I have to my name are in this pot, and my kids need to eat. If you call and win, I'm gonna go home, murder my two children and then commit suicide ' His expression was stone cold. Since there was a non-zero chance he was serious, I folded the nuts. Even though I knew the chances he was serious were near-zero, I simply imagined what would have happened on the off chance the threat was real. The next day everyone would roll their eyes at me and say 'so you just had to win that pot, didn't you? '
I tried to get the guy banned. As this was commerce, I failed.
At a 2/5 NLHE game at commerce, a guy shoves over my pot sized river bet (a out 3x pot) and then says 'the last few dollars I have to my name are in this pot, and my kids need to eat. If you call and win, I'm gonna go home, murder my two children and then commit suicide ' His expression was stone cold. Since there was a non-zero chance he was serious, I folded the nuts. Even though I knew the chances he was serious were near-zero, I simply imagined what would have happened on the off chance the
You should have called the bet and then called the police.
I thought about that actually. In my experience, LAPD are really lazy and ineffective. He could have told the cops he was joking and they may very well have left it alone. But you're right, had I called the bet and called the cops, if he managed to go through with it anyway it wouldnt be on my conscience. If id told the authorities and they couldn't stop him, that would mean I did my best without letting a likely bogus suicide threat scare me away from a pot. But at the time all I could think was was 'this guys unstable. There will be other pots, other games. Let this go. '
The Taj Mahal in AC used to be the Wild West.
There were always stories about people being stabbed over seat change buttons, robbed in the bathroom, etc.
The worst incident that i personally witnessed was (7 card stud was pretty much the only game back then):
Guy loses a 7 stud hand when he's dealt AAA, first 3 cards.
On 7th street, he knows he's beat but he calls anyway.
He turns bright red, dealer says "don't do it" "don't do it"
He proceeds to rip the 3 Aces in half and throw them at the dealer (ba
When I first starting playing in the mid 90's I would fly out to Philly and drive to AC to meet a buddy of mine and play nonstop for 3-4 days and then fly home. IIRC, all you could play was stud, limit and Omaha. Gawd, I was obsessed with the game back then and the crazy atmosphere of the Taj and AC just made it more alluring.
That room was huge and wide open so you could see and hear anything crazy that happened from just about any place in the room. I remember some dude was in a hand of stud and got pissed over his opponent rearranging his cards or something and was screaming about it nonstop, louder and louder until someone from another table yelled "shut up!".
Then another...
and another and another...
until the entire room had stood up shouting shut up and F-off while security dragged him out of the room while he cursed and flipped everyone off. Everyone broke out into a chorus of laughter as he exited the room but within 30 seconds it was back to the quiet clatter of chips.
I remember looking around the room taking it all in thinking how awesome the poker world is because there always seemed to be something crazy happening on top of the fun of the game
I miss being excited about the game, I no longer get the degen-tingles and have stopped playing
When I first starting playing in the mid 90's I would fly out to Philly and drive to AC to meet a buddy of mine and play nonstop for 3-4 days and then fly home. IIRC, all you could play was stud, limit and Omaha. Gawd, I was obsessed with the game back then and the crazy atmosphere of the Taj and AC just made it more alluring.
That room was huge and wide open so you could see and hear anything crazy that happened from just about any place in the room. I remember some dude was in a hand of stud
I agree with you. There was something about the Taj poker room that really made it unique.
I'd say you're both on it. Gzesh is correct that you can find all walks of life at other such places like the DMV or the airport. It's not unique to a poker room.
But more philosophically, I like 5thStreet's observation. Unlike the DMV or the airport, I'm far more likely to strike up a random conversation with someone at my poker table than I am with a person waiting for a mobile order in a McD's. And that's the difference: the interaction.
Then again, I would assume the stakes matter. I'm a low-s
In the Chicago area there is a super-tight surgeon who plays 2-5 and is the most miserable human being anyone has ever known. He's not obnoxious, but he does have the God-complex and clearly looks down on everyone while he sits there and nut-peddles all day only playing AQ+
The first time I ever was at the same table as him, within 15 minutes he told me I was "wasting my life" as an inner-city high school teacher and soon after I was talking about options strategy with two other guys and the surgeon looks at me and says, "you'll never make money with options. you should stop right away" (it's actually not that hard to make money with options if you take it seriously and treat it like a business and not some gambling outlet, only taking standard set ups with strict stop losses and you can do well)
A few years later I was talking to another reg in the room and he was friends with the surgeon and he told me the backstory of how his parents told him he was worthless his whole life and he has been trying to prove them wrong ever since (surgeon has to be over 65) and everyone around him tells him he needs serious therapy. He's just a miserable man and I honestly feel bad for him.
There's a legit 94 year old Black guy who plays in the Chicago area and once in awhile someone will make a comment when he goes and I always say, "that guy? Lee? He's my hero. We should all be so lucky to be able to sling chips at age 94 with guys one third of our age! What do you want him to do? Stay home and wait to die? Everytime he is here, that's a win for him" And he is a nice guy who always smiles and can play, doesnt slow up the game much at all for a guy 94
Poker is a great metaphor and microcosm for life. Both are about discipline, making good choices, and responding to adversity.
Meeting people from all strata of life is easily in my top 5 favorite things about poker.
At a 2/5 NLHE game at commerce, a guy shoves over my pot sized river bet (a out 3x pot) and then says 'the last few dollars I have to my name are in this pot, and my kids need to eat. If you call and win, I'm gonna go home, murder my two children and then commit suicide ' His expression was stone cold. Since there was a non-zero chance he was serious, I folded the nuts. Even though I knew the chances he was serious were near-zero, I simply imagined what would have happened on the off chance the
I have told this story before and it isn't to the same degree, but it is close.
When I was young where winning or losing at poker was huge for me and my life, I was playing at a home game. I regularly gave another player a ride to the game.
He was probably a break-even to slightly winning player in the game. It was close.
Anyway, one night I won big in the game. Most of my winnings came from beating him. I just happened to hit big hands when he hit slightly worse big hands. Poker.
I was driving him home and we were talking about life and random stuff.
He started talking about how his ex-wife was a beotch and he owed lots of money in child support. He was talking like a victim, but the fact that children were involved really tugged at my heart. I felt bad about the money I won. I really did. It felt like I was taking from his children.
The next week he won big and I lost a lot. I was second best while he was at the top of his range or I got it in good and he sucked out. Poker.
So the following week I go to pick him up for the game and he asks me if I want to come in and want to see his new TV. This was in the 1990's when a 55' inch TV was worth a fortune. As he is showing it to me, he gives me a little ribbing by saying that I paid for most of it when I lost to him last week. He continued giving me a hard time. He won big and his kids didn't see any of it. He bought a huge TV.
That was the best lesson I could learn at poker.
I am not going to feel sorry for my opponent. They are putting their money on the table and the chips end up where the do. That is up to fate/luck/probability. No one is going to give me a refund when they beat me, even if I "deserve" it. So I won't feel sorry for them when they lose.
That said, I will be one of the first people to speak up when I think a player is drunk or otherwise being unfairly taken advantage of. I will be one of the first to speak up if I see someone being conned, stolen from, or cheated. However if we are all playing by the both the rules and the spirit of the rules then the results are what they are.
If that results in someone doing something horrific later because they lost then that is on them. We both took our chances. If they won they would have likely chosen to spend that money in a way I would not agree with.
That is their business and I cannot control others choices. However I will not suffer because of others choices.
This is late 90s at a dingy casino when I was young and arrogant. It's about 3am and only the degens are left, and we are playing (IIRC) 4-8 limit omaha high only, which is about as tilting a game as you can get. A hand arises and I try one of the most hopeless multistreet, multiraise bluffs into multiple people in the history of poker, and it gets called down by two people; I don't remember the exact specifics, but it was something like the board is JTT42 with three spades, one guy has JJ and other guy has nut spades and I have nothing.
So I bet the river and they both call, and I turn over my hand and proudly say "pair of 2's" or whatever. Guy with JJ breathes a happy sigh of relief and turns over his hand, knowing he's the winner.
The other guy is a very small Asian man, maybe 5ft, and sitting in the 10 seat. I'm significantly bigger than him and sitting in the five. He looks at me and angrily asks WTF I'm doing raising with that. I answer snottily that I thought my hand was good. He doesn't get the joke and asks me how I can think a pair is good. I reiterate that I was sure I was going to win. He starts to ask something else heatedly, and the floorman (bored because he's there at 3am with one game running) is right there to tell him to drop it.
Next hand or two goes by and he's just burning a hole looking at me with furious eyes. I wasn't in de-escalation mood, so I met his stare with a giant s**t eating grin on my face. This (unsurprisingly) did not calm him down and he shouted asking what I was looking at and why I was smiling and I just said "nothing". He then stood up and took a started to come around the table.
The floorman I guess had already alerted security that things were getting heated, and before he got halfway around the table, he was tackled by two security guards, who (equally bored to be there at 3am) took him outside where all we could hear was thudding and moaning for a minute, before the security guys came back in chortling to each other.
With that all seemingly behind us, the game resumed for a few hands, but it was kind of dying quickly. Suddenly we see the two security guards rush out again, then come back in a couple minutes later holding a hockey stick (yes this was in Canada obv). Apparently the guy had gone to his car, gotten this hockey stick, and tried to smash his way back into the casino to get me.
Ironically, the guy's wife was sitting behind him watching him play, and was responsible for packing up his chips. She apologized on his behalf, and I had security escort me to my car. Don't think I ever saw him again.
In the Chicago area there is a super-tight surgeon who plays 2-5 and is the most miserable human being anyone has ever known. He's not obnoxious, but he does have the God-complex and clearly looks down on everyone while he sits there and nut-peddles all day only playing AQ+
The first time I ever was at the same table as him, within 15 minutes he told me I was "wasting my life" as an inner-city high school teacher and soon after I was talking about options strategy with two other guys and the sur
Pretty sure I know this guy
Not exactly an incident but hopefully worth sharing.
About ten years ago I was playing in a private game. I’d only played there once before and didn’t really know anybody in the player pool. There were ten players, two dealers, two house men, and three or four guys waiting.
The cops kicked the door in with guns pointed like they were raiding Tony Montana. After telling everyone to place their hands on the table one of them said “If you’re carrying a weapon, slowly raise one hand.”
Every hand in the room went up except mine.
^^ reminds me of something I experienced back in the day^^
I had just won a WSOP ME package to the 2006 WSOP and decided I need to try and get some deep stack poker tourney experience. I heard about an underground poker room in Dallas that was having a deep stack tourney but was a little concerned because several underground rooms had been robbed by people coming in with semi-automatics and taking chunks of cash so I just brought in my keys, my drivers license and $20 more than the buy-in.
There were probably 200+ players plus various staff and an older lady making food in the kitchen as well which took place in a warehouse type space in an industrial area of Dallas.
About an hour in, there's a loud bang and a lot of commotion and I look up to see a bunch of guys in black holding high guns screaming. I couldnt believe the first time I go to an underground game, it gets robbed...
I get a closer look and see "SWAT" written across the front of all the people followed by a bunch of other staff in windbreakers blazoned with SWAT as well. Then I see a crew of people with cameras filming everything.
Turns out the show Dallas Swat came along for the raid and was filming everything but when they asked for everyone to sign waivers, everyone refused so it never made it to air...in retrospect I wish we had given them permission so I could see the footage
The players I met were in construction, doctors, attorneys, retired grandmas, etc, etc... they arrested the operators and even the old lady cooking food, what a joke!
The players got tickets, I think some fought them and won. I didnt have time so I just paid the $250 fine and moved on.
such a waste of time and resources but I guess it makes for an interesting experience...
I could tell you a bunch of stories, all of which are true, from my experiences in poker and pool. One that involves a fight did not involve me, but a very close friend of mine from our childhood in Dayton. He lived in a beautiful home in Scottsdale and I was living in L.A. I came over to visit him and he took me down to the casino he was playing in (the one that was slightly out of town). This was about 25 years ago. My friend's name was Terry Johnson, a 5'10" 220 pound legitimate bad ass. Even as a teenager I saw him take big guys out with one punch. I knew he was some kind of gangster but I never discussed his "work" with him. He was my friend and that's what mattered to me.
Terry was playing the big game there (30-60 Stud) on a regular basis and killing it. He played damn good. I got in the 10-20 Limit Hold'em game right next to him. So on this night Terry is doing his thing and beating the game. There is a big guy in the game who takes a dislike to Terry. And Terry backs down from no one! Period!! So there is some smack talk at the table and when Terry goes to the restroom the guy spits in his drink. Terry returns and finishes his drink. Everyone at the table knows but won't say anything. After an hour or so the big guy has to go pee and that's when someone tells Terry what happened. The guy returns and Terry tells him he knows what the guy did, and the guy just laughs and says what are you going to do about it. Terry throws his new drink in his face. The big guy jumps up and says let's go outside. So out that go.
Maybe three minutes go by and Terry walks back in. He calls for security and when they come he tells them there is guy passed out outside. Everyone at the table laughs. Later on the way home I ask him what happened out there. He says the big guy took a swing at him and he hit him square in the middle of his face, and the guy dropped like a rock.
Maybe some of you who played in Phoenix back then remember Terry. He was killed/ambushed a few years later, but that's another story.
One more little tale. Some of you may know about this from when it was going on. Years ago at the Bike there was a group of Asians robbing people in the parking lot out back, after they had seen them make a score. It always happened at night under cover of darkness. That back lot was not well lit, and the Bike tried to keep this on the QT knowing it was bad for business. Anyway on this night a medium level tournament was coming to an end and I made the final table. Long story short, I finished 5th for 7,700 plus change. I threw the extra in the tip jar and took the 7,700 in chips to the cage to cash out. It was probably about 3 AM and maybe a dozen people had been watching the game. I'm at the cage and the cashier is taking time cashing me out. I notice a small Asian man about thirty feet away leaning on a column, kind of glancing my way a couple of times. Let's just say I have radar and something didn't feel right. The place was pretty empty and why was this guy standing there. Anyway I get my cash, tip the girl twenty and head out. I walk right by this guy and look right at him but he looks away.
I keep walking down the ramp toward the exit and take a look back. Sure enough this guy is coming too, maybe forty feet behind me. I get to the exit doors leading to the parking lot and take another look. He has been joined by a second man. Where he came from I don't know. I walk outside and cross the alleyway and head to the entrance to the car park. Now I look back and here they come out the doors, closer to me then before. I know something's up. I go about twenty feet more and turn around and walk back directly toward them. They stop and stand still. I purposely walk right between them and head back inside. Once inside I look back and they are just standing there unsure of what to do. I get a security guard (armed) and he escorts me to my car. They are nowhere to be seen.
The next day I call my friend Robert Turner who worked at the Bike and tell him what happened. He said I was lucky. Several people had been robbed in the parking lot during the last couple of months. They would follow you to your car and when you opened the door they would pull a gun on you. Caught them by surprise. I guess a lot of people don't really pay attention to what is going on around them and who's out there watching them. I do! I said I have radar. Years on the road will do that to you. Most of my pool playing buddies have been robbed. I'm one of the only ones who hasn't been so far, and I long ago quit gambling at pool. I was right too. The Bike wanted to keep it on the QT and did not want it in the news, and the police co-operated even if a police report was made. After all they were the biggest tax payers in Bell Gardens. Eventually they added more lighting back there and put up a sentry tower, that was manned 24 hours a day.
Enough for now.
I really enjoy this thread and witnessing the drama that comes with playing poker but not a fan of engaging in it personally.
One of the better ones I’ve seen was a corona bottle thrown across mid/low limit section of borgata about a decade ago and the thrower being escorted out. I think he was aiming at big bad Bob the floor man lol
Another story I luckily didn’t witness first hand was I showed some college buddies a “home game” aka raked private game in Chinatown in boston when I went to school there decades ago which I happened to have found listed here on 2p2. I played once or twice did ok at the 1/3 game. So few friends went one day I stayed in the dorm and played unraked home game with some others and midway through our game those ones who went to Chinatown game came back looking like they seen a ghost. Apparently Chinatown game got robbed at shotgun point by some masked robber barrons. I dodge bullets baby!
forget it jakes it's chinatown
This is late 90s at a dingy casino when I was young and arrogant. It's about 3am and only the degens are left, and we are playing (IIRC) 4-8 limit omaha high only, which is about as tilting a game as you can get. A hand arises and I try one of the most hopeless multistreet, multiraise bluffs into multiple people in the history of poker, and it gets called down by two people; I don't remember the exact specifics, but it was something like the board is JTT42 with three spades, one guy has JJ and
Canadian stories are always good. Canada is like vanilla ice cream, so any ingredient you add will taste awesome.
I think most of those stories show why it's much safer to play online
Guy got two outered and threw the burger he was eating at the dealer. He was promptly removed and 86’d, fortunately.
X-posted from my 2p2 blog.
Got assaulted at poker tonight!
Belligerant dude cussed me out after I stacked him.
Then he put his middle finger in my face, so I called the floor.
He called me a pussy and continued berating me. Finally he was asked to leave, so he pushed his chest in my face and threw an elbow into my back.
I wasn't hurt, but holy **** **** that guy, so I called security.
I filled out a report. They affirmed he would be dealt with the next time he comes in.
I'm supposed to drop off my report at a police station. Se
there's a female floor at aria who is probably the worst floor person all over vegas ... basically every situation where she is called over to a table to settle a dispute turns into an altercation :-)))
there's a female floor at aria who is probably the worst floor person all over vegas ... basically every situation where she is called over to a table to settle a dispute turns into an altercation :-)))
Pretty sure I know who you are talking about and one of the reasons I stopped playing tournaments at Aria, that and the crowded tables, and awful parking situation..