Last week in Vegas, I was sitting in a cash game at the Rio, talking with a guy next to me, Stephen Roselius, about the poker radio show I do with Dennis Phillips. We shared some stories about things we’d seen and heard at the poker table, and he told me one I hadn’t heard before, involving poker veteran TJ Cloutier. It involved a hand in which the dealer pushed the chips to TJ even though he no longer had any cards. Stephen said he’d find TJ’s version of the story and send it to me, and here it is. It’s from an interview he gave a few years ago to Dana Smith:
I was playing pot-limit hold’em down in Shreveport. We’d been playing for quite a few hours and there was a lot of money on the table. A hand came up in which I had the stone nuts on fourth street. I had $5,000 in front of me and made a $2,000 bet. Wayne Edmunds was in the game and he had a habit of putting his head down after he called a bet, so that he never saw what was going on anywhere else. As I was making my bet, the dealer grabbed my cards and threw them in the muck. Of course, Wayne didn’t see it happen. “What do I do now?!” I was wondering. I have big hands and so I just kept them out in front of me like I was protecting my cards. The dealer burned and then turned the river card. I bet my last $3,000 and Wayne threw his hand away. I won the pot without any cards! Everybody at the table except Wayne saw what had happened, but nobody said a thing. So, this is what I call my “mystery hand” play.