shufflers

[Tommy Angelo]

A buddy of mine played in the main event of the WSOP this year. After he got home, we were talking poker, and I told him about a recent change in my game.

I've been a chip shuffler since I first saw someone else do it 20 years or so ago. Since then I've played a million hands of table poker, shuffling all the while. When you figure between hands and especially hyper-shuffling between betting rounds and everything, I've done the shuffling move with two short stacks of chips, I don't know, at least a million times, probably more like 10 million. That's a lot of times for a finger guy like me to do something with his fingers. Then during my most recent session, I stopped shuffling. Didn't even try really. Just happened. Next session I intent to force the issue to see what else just happens. I was telling my buddy about this and he was reminded of something he saw during the main event of the WSOP last week.

Ten minutes into the first round, he noticed that none of the players at the table except him were shuffling any chips. That's one out of ten shufflers. Whereas at a limit hold'em game, it's more like one out of ten players does NOT shuffle. My buddy wondered, "Are WSOP entrants more at peace than B&M LHE players?" No, that's not it, he deduced immediately. The reason they were not shuffling chips was because they did not know how. They had played most all of their poker while gripping a mouse, not a stack. "Ah, the modern age," he thought.

We realized then that as the world changes so quickly around us, we can count on one thing, at least for now. Brick-and-mortar limit hold'em is where the shufflers roam.

Tommy