Surely It's A Split Pot - Oh, It's Not...

So I'm playing in a lively £250 PLO game at the Vic when the following hand occurs.

The guilty party in this coup is a veteran of the Vic, definitely a player who should know better.

I raise UTG with some sort of double suited rundown hand, the veteran calls and now the star re-raises the pot. This very much looks like aces; both me and the veteran call as well as another player I think. Whatever, there was about £480 in the pot. BTW, the effective stack size between the veteran and the star is about £3k.

Flop comes down K Q T. I check, the veteran checks and now the Star bets £250. I fold and the veteran makes it £750. The star now calls that raise and re-raises the pot. The veteran now goes all-in for a little over 2 and a half grand which the star calls.

Sitting there watching the hand play out I figured that both players had the nuts at that point (A J - as if you need me to tell you) and that the veteran had the freeroll, two pairs or trips to go with his Broadway.

But no!!! The Veteran turned over J9xx (can't remember the other two cards, but they were in the region of the flop so he did have outs). Considering that it was highly likely that the star had aces, surely it wouldn't have been too hard to imagine that a Jack was one of his sidecards?

I don't know, I've been guilty of some terrible plays myself, but getting it all-in with the sucker end of the straight in PLO? Sure, the other player was a star, but you just have to wait until you have the goods against these types (btw, the board blanked off and the star won a nice pot). I'm sure I wasn't the only "local" who felt a bit embarrassed for the veteran.

This brings me to another matter - as you can see above, I have been pretty quick to criticise a horrible play where another player has seemingly slaughtered his money senselessly. But the truth is in poker, we sometimes do some fucking idiotic things in the heat of the moment. I always think that at least for a nano-second there, we figured it was the right play.

Anyway, the reason I'm suddenly being so fair to the veteran (and believe me, there are many Vic regulars who would enjoy a delicious helping of schadenfreude if they knew who I was talking about) is because, like the idiot I am, I posted what I thought was an interesting hand that I played in the £250 NL game on the 2+2 strategy forum.

There were a couple of reasonable responses, but most of the thread ended up saying what a complete donkey I am etc etc. Now of course I expected that, but it made me think how quick poker players are to just slam other players and so on.

The amount of times you hear people cunting off other players or somebody gives you an incredibly forceful and emphatic opinion on how badly a certain hand was played. You'd think that none of these fuckers ever played a hand badly in their life, when in fact quite the opposite is true.