Mucking aces is awesome

I was gonna open with some sort of joke about how I decided to put my entire bankroll on the NCAA basketball game Monday night cause I have a really strong feeling. But I'm not really an April Fools kind of guy. So lets stick with what's true.

One thing that's unfortunately true is the word awesome has snuck back into my vernacular. This would be fine if it was 1984. However in 2007 I'm not exactly sure how to deal with this. I don't want to point fingers. It's not about the blame.

Awesome first reentered my life as sarcasm. A good friend has been using it comically to describe people who suck and this use stuck with me. But of course I've overdone it and I'm now at the point where it doesn't matter to me if something is good or bad.

Either way I'm gonna say it's awesome.

What's awesome about using awesome to describe everything is that you don't ever have to really think.

Poker is awesome.

And awesome is the new gnarley.

Getting pocket aces cracked is awesome.

Awesome segue.

People ask me if there's ever a situation where I'd fold pocket aces preflop. And of course there are times like if you were playing in a WSOP satellite tournament where the top 15 players win a seat into the main event. If there are 16 players left, you're a medium stack and a big stack goes all in before you act you might fold aces since there's nothing to gain by being a chip leader, and everything to lose if you get eliminated. So yes it happens.

But I mention this topic because I found a second example where I believe it's correct to fold pocket aces.

It happened during a sit and go at my friend Gabe's house this week. I drank half a bottle of Petron. When we got down to 3 players the room started to spin. It's worth nothing that we were playing outdoors so it could have been the earth spinning. But either way I felt lousy.

Of course this is when I looked down and saw pocket aces.

But what can I do?

So I (correctly I believe) threw them into the muck. I got up and I exited the tournament to take care of business. I think this is the long term positive expected value play.

It occurs to me now that if I had stayed and played the hand I might have had a once in a lifetime opportunity to puke all over the table if my aces had been cracked. But that only has value short term. Long term you probably gotta fold there.

Incidentally my wife won 2 of the 3 sit and go's we played that night. I don't want to brag but she also won $20 playing video poker at the Wynn. That's the good news. The bad news is she officially passed me in accuracy percentage points in our 2007 family gambling leader board.

But don't feel bad for me cause I still got 8 months to catch up to her.