What the $%#@ ?

Playing a friendly game last night I witnessed what has to be one of the craziest things I have ever seen. Some beer had been consumed but not nearly had enough that the action could be blamed on it. The truth is that sometimes people just do crazy things.

We were playing no-limit hold'em with .25 and .50 blinds (note to keyboard makers - please put a "cent" symbol on the keyboard somewhere). We had been playing for quite a while when a player we will call Ms.X limped in. The action folded to a player we will call Ms.Y, who pushed all of her chips - a stack of $11.50 into the middle. This was a massive raise for the kind of poker we were playing where a bet of $2 was seen as ultra-aggressive. Everyone started mucking - everyone but Ms.X - and Ms.Y assumed the pot was hers.

"What do you have?" asked Ms.X. "Pocket aces?"

"Yes," replied Ms.Y. She turned over the two red aces, then tossed them in the muck and began pulling in the pot. Technically speaking, Y just killed her hand by mucking but this was a friendly game and she just assumed, naturally enough, that the hand was over.

"I call," said X. Everyone laughed and Y continued raking the pot.

"No, seriously!" X exposed her own hole cards, Kd Qh, "I have a feeling I'm gonna hit a full house! I call!"

It took several seconds to convince Y that X was indeed serious. Y fished her Ad Ah out of the muck and  put another $11 into the pot.

"The odds have to be worse than 80/20 for her," remarked one observer. I disagreed, thinking X's hand had a 23% chance here, but calculating the odds now I see I was wildly wrong. In this situation, Kd Qh has only a slim 11.9% chance to win against Ah Ad, with a 0.5% chance the pot will split. It was, in short, an insane call to make.

"I feel good," said X. "I feel a full house coming."

The flop came Qc 9s 4h. As good a flop as X could reasonably hope for, but she was still a big underdog. The odds were now exactly 80/20 in favour of the aces.

The turn was very bad for X because it paired the four: Qc 9s 4h.4c. Now even if a king came on the river, Y's two pair (aces and fours) would beat X's kings and queens. The odds for X hitting one of the two remaining queens was a mere 4.5% but that was the only way she could win.

And, of course the queen hit on the river. Everyone shouted "OHHH!"

Queens full of fours. A full house. Just as predicted.