Nit-rolled

With online poker out of the picture I've been trying my hand at live poker. I don't see myself pursuing it as a full-time job, but there are worse ways to make some money on the side. It is, of course, very different.

I was playing in a 1-2 game at the Heidelberg, a bar in Ann Arbor. I opened to $10 under the gun with queens and got two callers. Then one of the blinds 3bet to 25. The raiser was a kid in his early twenties, wearing a hat and listening to headphones, so he had probably watched some poker on TV and thought he knew what he was doing. The size of his raise, though, is ridiculous -- with 40 already in the pot raising only 15 more gives me the correct odds to call with pretty much any two cards. Since the whole idea of poker is to get your opponents to make mistakes -- fold when they should call, or call when they don't have the right odds -- giving someone a price like that rarely makes sense. I had about $150 on the table. Against a competent, aggressive opponent it would be the easiest all-in in the world. I have the third-best starting hand in hold'em. But live players are typically very passive and I had a suspicion he might be the kind of player who would 3bet only with exactly kings or aces. Nonetheless given the strength of my hand, my stack size, and the amount of money already in the pot I couldn't talk myself into any other than a shove. The two callers quickly folded and the raiser started to think. I mentally pumped the fist. Obviously if he had aces or kings he would instantly snap it off and those are the only two hands that beat me. So now either he folds and I get the money in the pot or he calls and I get my whole stack in ahead. After awhile he decides to call. The flop comes ace-high all clubs. Immediately he slumps in his chair and says, "I'm pretty sure I'm dead now." I figure he has something like tens with no club. I even have the queen of clubs, which would mean he's drawing to only one out in the deck. The turn is another ace and the river is a brick. I flip my queens and get ready to scoop the pot. He flips over two kings.

From the other side of the table, one of the good players at the table yells, "You got nit-rolled, bro!" This is a combination of two pieces of poker terminology. A nit is a derogatory term for a risk-averse player. Slow-rolling is when you delay calling or revealing your cards, typically to annoy or embarrass your opponent. For example, if your opponent went all-in and you had the nuts (the best possible hand) and you pretended to think for a long time before calling that would be a slow-roll. Hence nit-roll: the kid had a slam dunk call, but was such a nit that he thought for a long time, making me think I must have the best hand.