Worst Fold You Ever Made?

Last night. 6 card PLO. Board KK922. I folded quads. Then I find out quads losing is the qualifying hand for their BBJ. My share would have been 3000BB.

Sigh.

I certainly cannot beat this... kind of insane honestly. I feel sorry

I folded a set once

I have told this story elsewhere on this site, but it has been so long ago I might not have the details exact.

It was back in the 2000s at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas (so it was $1/$3) It was when they only had 4 or 5 tables on the main midway just outside the nightclub. Back then, cash played on the table. With so few tables, they would only have one supervisor and he doubled as a cashier/bank/brush. So if he was going to leave the floor for a few minutes the dealers were on their own for new player buy ins.

I had been playing all night late into the night. It was a good night. Bought in for a few hundred and had well over $3000 in front of me, maybe even $4000. The floor left for a while so the dealer used me as a bank. As players rebought, I would take the cash and give up chips. This happened over and over again. After a bit I had significantly more cash than chips in front of me. Then I hit a bit of a downswing and lose a couple of medium pots further bleeding chips.

So I end up having a little more than $3000 in cash in front of me and just a couple of stscks of red chips.

Then this hand comes up. Button in seat 2. Blinds are seats 3 and 4. UTG opens for a fairly large raise. I have been playing all night with UTG. He has about $2500 - $3000. He is a an older gentleman. A fairly decent player, not an OMC, but a very unimaginative player. For anyone who pays attention, he will let you know exactly what he has. At worse, his bluffs will all be strong semi-bluffs. He will never open with crazy hands, you will never catch him on the river with air.

A pretty good player, just unimaginative. He has made a ton of money showing down solid hands against drunk crazy players who don't/can't adjust to him.

So he opens in seat 5 UTG for a large amount (maybe like $20 in a $1/$3 game). It folds to me in seat 9. I have pocket KK. I think and make it $50 or something like that. It folds around to him. He thinks for a few seconds and says he is all in.

Uh.....

He has $2500 to $3000 in a $1/$3 game and shoves it all in pre-flop and I have him covered with KK.

I am miserable. I try and put him on anything other than aces, but it is near impossible. What is a GOOD, but straightforward, unimaginative player shoving 800-1000 BB in pre-flop in a very deepstacked game with anything but aces?

I think this is the longest I have ever tanked in my life. There is no way I can call, but I am desperately figuring out how not to fold KK pre-flop in a $1/$3 game.

I finally give up, show my KK to him and tell him I cannot call. He immediately goes into shock. He is amazed that I folded. He asks how I can fold KK for only ~$250 dollars and shows JJ.

Only then did I realize he didn't know I had $3000+ in cash in front of me and only saw the ~$250 in chips. He thought it was going to be a $500 pot at worse so he shoved thinking his JJ was competitive.

Yep, I folded an 80/20 advantage for ~1800 BBs preflop.

Well, he was just a nitwit having played with you all night and not realizing you had all that cash in play.

But you're right, you cant call. It'd be just reckless given the circumstance.

I have a somewhat similar situation with KK. Its a bit long..

This was back in the early Full Tilt days (04 or 05 probably). I was 19 and didnt know any better but my buddy (we were not really friends, he was a grade older and more like my weed dealer) wanted to buy in half a buy in at 2-4nl.

I agreed, thinking I'd be cool for having this drug dealer dude thinking enough of my poker game to sweat me. So we go in a couple hundred a piece and while I was making the majority of decisions, he'd put his two cents in in bigger spots. This goes well for about an hour or so and we get up to nearly 600$ .

Then....he says I gotta go to the bathroom, ill be back. Off he goes...

Next hand I of course gets Kings. I want to say I raise up front, good/solid player 3 bets to 30 something, I make it like 85 and he shoves. Im looking around like...where the **** is he at??!! Of course I didnt want to stick my (half his) stack in when I believe the player had us covered and lose.

Before he could get back I mucked them, he walks up literally 5 seconds later and sees we're down 80ish dollars. So, I had to show him what happened and he goes ballistic. My friend was not a good poker player, even by 2005 standards. He wasn't straight awful either but he proceeded to let me know how terrible of a fold I made and I cost us money.

Uh huh.

I never played poker with him again.

Fwiw, I've laid down kings a handful of times since then, but this was a funny circumstance and I still feel good about the fold. Anybody that played online back then knows that a 5 bet all in is AA, KK, or AK at minimum.

I have told myself that if I ever get into the same situation (which will never happen because cash no longer really plays), before folding I will at minimum ask for a count of my opponents chips. By doing this, I will make sure my opponent realizes what the stakes we are playing for really are. If I had asked for a count back then, he would have realized he shoved into a stack that covered his ~$2500 to $3000. I am pretty sure I could have gotten a good read.

It was the kind of room that smelled like old smoke, spilled whiskey, and stories no one ever told twice.

Room Eleven. Back of the Black Lantern Tavern, down a narrow hallway that reeked of fried grease and regret. No windows. One flickering bulb. Table had a bullet hole in it from a game two weeks ago. Nobody brought it up. The dealer—some ex-con named Mouse—had a lazy eye and a twitchy left hand, but the cards came clean, so nobody complained.

This wasn’t a casino. No cameras. No rules. Just eight players, cash only, and enough tension to stop a heartbeat.

I was nursing a cheap beer that tasted like cardboard and broken promises when I got dealt the hand.

Ace of Spades. Ace of Clubs.

Pocket rockets. Again. For a second, I thought maybe I was dreaming. But the sharp smell of bleach and blood in the carpet kept me grounded.

Around the table sat the usual suspects—and one I’d never seen before.

Cousin Ricky to my left, all gold rings and coke nail. Talked too much. Folded too quick.
Maria "Boom Boom" Vasquez on the other side. Quiet. Deadly. Once shot a guy in the foot for slow rolling.
Elijah the Priest, who quoted Scripture when he raised and swore in tongues when he lost.

And then there was the new guy.
They called him Milo "Two-Tap" Green—on account of how he’d knock twice on the table before he pushed in a raise. Supposedly did time in three different states, but no one knew what for. He looked like a math teacher and a mortician had a baby.

I didn’t like how he watched people. Like he wasn’t playing cards—he was profiling.

Mouse dealt the flop:
Ace of Diamonds. Ten of Hearts. Ten of Spades.

Again, I’m sitting on a full house.
Aces full of tens.
A beast.

I kept my breath even, tossed in a casual bet. Enough to look greedy but not desperate.

Ricky folded. Elijah folded after mumbling something about Babylon. Maria gave me a long look, then shook her head and mucked her cards.

Only Milo stayed in. Two taps on the felt. He matched my bet without blinking.

The turn came:
Ten of Clubs.

Three tens on the board now.

I stopped breathing.

That was the card. The fork in the road. Either I was about to double up or die broke.

I checked. He checked back, sipping flat cola from a glass that looked like it hadn’t been washed since ’98.

River came:
Seven of Hearts.

Didn’t mean a damn thing.

Then he did it.

Tap. Tap.
And pushed in a stack so high it made my neck itch.

No grin. No bluff tells. Just two dead eyes waiting to bury me.

If he had the fourth ten, I was drawing dead. If he didn’t, I had him beat by miles. But it didn’t feel right. I’d been in games like this. Games that smelled like danger.

And right then, this didn’t smell like a bluff.
It smelled like a setup.

I thought about the rent. The debt I owed Maria’s cousin. The .38 I knew Milo kept tucked behind his belt.

Then I did the thing that no one expected.

I folded.

The entire table went dead silent.

Even Mouse stopped shuffling.

Milo stared at me like I’d just spoken in Sanskrit. Then—without a word—he pulled his chips in and stood. Gave me a slow, almost respectful nod. Then walked out of the room.

He never showed his hand.

Later, when I went out back for a smoke, Maria followed me. Said she’d played with Milo once before—in Detroit. A guy there called his river shove with a boat.

He never made it home.

“You didn’t win,” she said, lighting her cigarette.
“No,” I said, “but I think I might’ve stayed alive.”

And that’s the story.
The hand I should’ve played, but didn’t.
The hand that made me a myth in a room where people vanish when they lose too loud.

Fascinating

folding KK seems impossible. I don't fold that one except in those rare tournament situations where you are sometimes right to fold AA

@fidstar-poker I enjoyed the first few paragraphs enough that I think I will save the rest for later.

I had treeps