Clock Watchin' Ain't No Good

I think it's a bad sign when I'm urging the seemingly-frozen clock forward at work and it's only 7:50.

All of you people quitting jobs to live the glamorous life of freestylin', chip-wieldin' poker supahstars need to cut that shit out. You're planting evil seeds in impressionable minds of monkeys trapped in CubeLandia.

Last night was odd. It's the first time I've ever left a table when someone was handing me money.

I hadn't played any poker to speak of since Saturday, so I fired up the laptop while watching the Illinois/Wisconsin game last night. I was working off the monthly PokerPlex bonus, playing a couple 1/2 tables, mainly on autopilot. My laptop can handle two Crypto tables fine, but a third one slows the action way down on all three, so I just stick with two. Due to all my multi-tabling lately, it seems criminal to only have two tables open.

So I fire up Pacific, as I'm still working on clearing a bonus there, which is kind of slow-going, given you can only play one table at a time. I'd run up my deposit a good bit there so lately I've been sitting 5/10 shorthanded tables. Which is what I did last night.

I wait for the blinds and immediately note that only one person has a decent stack, with everyone else under $100. I also notice that the guy to my right is raising every single hand pre-flop. He's also chatting (odd for Pacific, given how craptacular their chat function is) constantly, talking about how drunk he is, how his girlfriend just left him, etc. No one is responding but he keeps chatting. And raising.

I didn't catch anything for a few orbits but finally see AKo on the button. Raisey McGee raises it and it ends up capped, with the two of us heads-up. Flop is A K rag, rainbow. He hands me the rest of his $40 stack. And rebuys for $60.

The table is four handed now, when we enter Strange Poker Land. For the next eight hands, he and I end up heads-up when the flop hits. I win every single hand for the next eight hands (dealt AA, KK, and 1010, as well as hitting on bullshit hands like A6o, 78s, etc.). Each hand he bleeds off his stack and rebuys for $60.

He keeps chatting, talking about how depressed he is, how he's just going to go put a gun in his mouth when he's blown through all his money, etc. It doesn't help that my screenname for the account is an obviously female name (I do that sometimes when signing up just to be sneaky, as I think it sometimes help tilt certain Cro-Mags when a "woman" is taking their stack), which sets him off even more, rambling about the evil that is woman, etc.

I bust him yet again, he rebuys yet again, but I sit out, tell him to turn off the computer and get some sleep. I left the table but pulled it up again just to watch. He ended up blowing through another $1,000 or so before he either busted out or gave it up.

I've pondered about the ethics of a situation like this but never have been involved directly in it. Am I happy that my account is $500 or so to the good because of sitting at that table? Sure. Would I give the money back, if offered the chance? Hell no. Was anything he said necessarily true? Of course not.

But I still don't feel good about it. For the very simple reason that I've been that guy before, acting out of my gourd, for whatever reason. And that's a bad place to be. Especially when you have access to online gambling sites with funded accounts.

Lest you think I'm noble, like I said, I ain't giving the fool his lunch money back. But I do feel at least a slight bit better that I actually managed to stand up and, at the very least, decline to take any more money from him. Which is obviously -EV but maybe at least a little +KARMA.