Everything is anathema

I played live yesterday. The table make-up was one not unfamiliar to most of us. A couple of good pros, one whale and some assorted regfish. At one point I went to muck my cards and after flicking them to the dealer one of them exposed so that most of the table could see. It happened to be a pair on the flop and the pot was still multi-way. What followed was some kind of demented mass hysteria. The dealer looked at me like I had just shot his wife and children and the regfish started up like a cacophony of howler monkeys. They thought I'd done it on purpose. Rather than point out that I'd have to be Gambit to have made the card land like that on purpose, I merely said "Sorry, it was a mistake". This was no succour to the enraged apes. The dealer continued to stare at me, mouth-open like a retarded halibut. One of the regfish's friends called over another friend "Did you see that? He just folded and showed and the POT IS STILL MULTIWAY!" I repeated, "Sorry, it was a mistake." It took literally five minutes for the "regs" to calm down and stop acting like professional funeral wailers. I ordered a cranberry juice.

All of this got me thinking about one of those ugly poker truths: The vast majority of idiocy comes from the middle, not the fringes. What I mean is, although plenty of recreational players, fish, whales, whatever, have bad attitudes I think far more bad regulars have bad attitudes and in fact I even expect it from a bad reg until proven otherwise. The table yesterday was a case in point. I lost count of the insults (or rather never started counting) that the bad regs were flinging. The only players who did not fling insults/act like I'd just pulled out my cock and urinated on the table were the other good reg, who just looked embarrassed, and the whale, who thought the whole thing was hilarious and who happened to be a genuinely funny and likeable guy.

We all let things tilt us sometimes, but don't be those guys.