[Dan Druff]

I was the "WSOP boy" in question.

It's sad that "The Gift" here couldn't just discuss the hand in question, without peppering the message with lame insults and pseudo-intellectual psychobabble. I could make a few comments about him, but I'll refrain for now...

Regarding the situation and the hand:

1) It is true that a drunk sat down in the game. The drunk was strange. At first he acted like he had no clue what he was doing (so badly that it seemed over-the-top and phony), and kept proclaiming he was drunk. He must have said he was drunk about 10 times in the first 5 minutes at the table. Despite all of this, he was folding every hand. Finally I got tired of this apparent ruse, amd I told him that none of us were buying his act. But...

It turned out that he really WAS a clueless drunk, as his subsequent play showed! The tightness ended, and he really did seem to be drunk without an idea of how to play properly. He chunked off a good 10k or so rather quickly before leaving. However, he was insulted that I called him a liar, and he started talking trash to me. I talked trash back to him, and basically acted like I was raising hands wildly because he was firing me up. Not true at all. I did this on purpose, and decided that, the way this guy was playing, I could get a lot more action from him when I did have good (or ideally great) hands. After taking a few beats against him early, I did indeed beat him out of a lot of his money.

"The Gift" tries to make us understand that I was agitated, but in the example he posted about, I had tens -- a very strong hand shorthanded, and certainly strong on a jack-rag-rag flop. I won't bother to further explain my play on that one. Some people have already explained it pretty well.

"The Gift" can say what he wants regarding me being "nerdy", but the fact is that the only reason the trash talking started between me and the "jock" (more like a fat, drunk idiot) was because I was the one who had the stones to call the guy out on what appeared to be a fake drunk act. (Everyone else at the table just quietly whispered about this, afraid to confront him.) Once it turned out he really was a drunk, I was the only one going back and forth with the guy in order to get more action out of him.

I guess that "The Gift" saw this whole thing as some "nerd vs. jock" routine out of a bad '80s teen movie, rather than the situation it really was.

I guess some of us call out the jerks at the table (and get their action), while others slink away quietly and post on forums from the safety of their computer.