Social Security

You're playing in a $10-$20 hold'em game with a kill, and the good news is that the game's just fine; the bad news is that a half-hour into your session, you've already taken three ridiculous beats. You're a little concerned about the negative impact on your table image, but fortunately, the next hand you play finds you stacking the chips of a sizable pot, easily large enough to trigger the kill. On the button, you look down and find pocket deuces.

The under-the-gun player – we'll call him Joe Solid – a paint-by-the-numbers sort who prides himself in never playing marginal hands out of position, limps in along with his neighbor, Mr. Move, a normally aggressive type whose limp here signals weakness. Everyone else folds, you pass your option, the small blind calls and the big blind knocks the table. The flop comes 9-4-2 rainbow, the kind of flop you'd like to take home to meet the folks. It's checked around to you, you bet, and everyone calls. The hand is setting up nicely, and Mr. Move's uncharacteristic check plays right into your hands. Had he led, you'd have had to choose between raising – and possibly freezing out the others – and smooth-calling, which coming from a kill-blind staring at that board, would likely set off even more alarms than a raise. As it is, you get to hang on to other customers and the element of surprise going into the expensive streets.

The turn's a 5, completing the rainbow, as harmless a card as the deck would seem to hold, but son of a gun if the surprise isn't on you – for as the blinds check, Joe Solid's index finger drops slightly, as if to check along, and then he reaches back for his chips and fires. Hmmm. That hitch wasn't feigned, and you didn't imagine it, any more than you imagined the oh-so-casual shrug with which he tried to cover it up. Yikes, timeout!

It's not that you really need one; the checklist of hands you can put him on is pretty short. The board and the player make two pair impossible, and as much as you'd like to put him on an overpair, you know it just ain't so. This guy always raises preflop with queens or better, and he clearly would've tried to protect tens or jacks by either betting the flop or check-raising with an eye toward isolating the anticipated late-position bettor. Nor does he have a straight – ace-rag under the gun is against his religion, and 6-3 isn't worth mentioning. Of course, you'd like to put him on A-3 because it would leave you plenty of outs, but it just doesn't jive, and besides, there's still the matter of that hitch business. People don't hitch when they hit the card they're looking for; they hitch when they're thrown by something they hadn't anticipated. Let's face it, Joe Solid's got a set, and just like you, he was waiting to drop the hammer; what he hadn't anticipated was a turn card that would get him off his plan. But the 5 was a fly in the ointment, and it suddenly hit him that going for a check-raise now meant risking a free card to an inside wheel draw for anyone holding an ace, an idea he suddenly thought better of.

Yup, Joe's got a set, all right, and since deuces are the smallest size they come in, you're looking at one out. The silver lining to this cloud is that you just got awfully lucky, because a lot of things – the turn card, Joe's position, your position, his predictability, and his tell – all converged to supply you with the information necessary to dodge a nasty little bullet. Life's good, isn't it? You're darn right it is!

So – forgive me for asking, but I'm inquisitive by nature – how come just before you muck your underset, you "sadly" hold it up for your neighboring players to see? I mean, if you're no longer chasing the pot – what exactly are you chasing? Sympathy? Respect? Admiration?

Good luck to ya, and let me know how that cure for cancer is coming.

This is not to suggest that showing your cards is necessarily a strategic mortal sin. Poker is an activity with both social and strategic aspects, and as long as it doesn't compromise the action, showing a laydown is a harmless bit of "social back-and-forth" that many players routinely engage in. And it can yield benefits – prompting a winner, under no obligation to show his cards, to show them anyway, or encouraging others to show their future laydowns. Most of the time, though, it's a harmless ritual of little consequence – but then, most of the time, when we speak of "big" laydowns, we're not really talking about big hands at all, but big starting cards. Mucking pocket kings when the flop comes A-Q-Q, or dumping pocket rockets when the chips are flying across a board showing K-Q-K-Q – shoot, these aren't big laydowns, they're no-brainers. On the other hand, laying down a set on the turn in a $10-$20 game for one bet with a barely connected rag board is a very big laydown – highly questionable under normal circumstances or in the absence of a stone-cold read – and one you'd be well-advised to keep to yourself. Almost nothing good can come of showing it, but plenty of bad stuff can.

Let's say, for example, you're wrong in your read: It turns out that Joe Solid does get out of line now and then, and you threw away a winner. Keep the laydown to yourself and you've learned a lesson about his game while revealing nothing about your own, but show it to the world and suddenly you're the lesson for the day – and the perceptions your opponents form may be the opposite of the admiration you were seeking. In light of the bad beats that kicked off your session, you may not come across as shrewd at all, but weak and snakebitten. Or take another example: let's say your read was correct, but that after showing your laydown, the river brings a miracle deuce. Ouch! You'll get sympathy, all right; in fact, you'll get the good stuff saved for special company – the poor, overanalyzing souls who can't do anything right, the cursed quads-mucking sad sacks who outsmart themselves at every turn. I doubt that's the kind of sympathy you were looking for, but not to worry, it's quickly going to morph into a different dynamic anyway, something along the line of sharks preparing for a feeding frenzy. Will your opponents' assessment of your laydown be skewed by the river card? Probably, but so what? Try explaining to a shark who smells blood in the water that his thinking is "flawed". Face it, if you show this hand, you're not going to see a free card for a month. All you'll accomplish is provide your opponents with free information.

Of course, it's highly unlikely that your one-outer will come, but that's not the point. If someone wants to take a backstage tour of your personal poker game, let him buy a ticket. If you want to get stroked, get a massage. Getting the money's about being smart – not people knowing you're smart. Heck, you know you're smart, I know it, and your mother knows it. If you're secure in your game, isn't that enough?