My Craziest Hand So Far: We Show Our Cards on the Flop

Cross-posting from House of Blogs.

$1/$2 MGM Springfield:

I have an Albanian to my right, and his countryman friend two seats to my left.

Spoiler

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The Albanians don't have much experience. They seem to have played a few home games and not much more. They talk to each other in Albanian, before and after hands. The dealer does not enforce the English-only rule at the table rule, and I say nothing, because if they're cheating, they're doing a really awful job of it...and after a few orbits of careful observation, I don't suspect them in the least. And I'm generally not a rules nit vs fun players.

We are $500 effective. Villain covers me. EP opens for $12, CO to my right calls, and I make it $45 on the BTN with A♥Q♠. SB folds and the Albanian in the BB makes it $90. Folds around to me. I look over and see that Villain in the BB has no stack left, so I call.

Pot: ($205) - Heads up. [strike]One player is all-in.[/strike]

But he isn't all-in. He had separated his stack and kept his remainder way to the left, next to another player. His actual remaining stack covers me.

I show my hand, stupidly, and the dealer reminds me that there is still action left.

Goddamn it. There goes my $90 through carelessness. I'm going to check behind or fold on most flops—even moderately favorable ones—what else can I do? I've screwed the pooch on this hand.

Villain shows his hand: T♣T♠

OMGWTFBBQ!!1 The table erupts. As does the dealer. "You cannot do that! You cannot show your hands!" she admonishes. I figure she'll call the floor, and they'll call the hand dead or something, but she does not.

Let's see a flop:

A♦7♥7♠

Villain checks. The dealer is still jawing about the hand and our egregious violations of it. I want the hand to be over and I want to take down the pot before she calls the floor. I bet $150. Let's end this now.

Villain calls. He calls!

Pot ($505) - Heads up

The table is going nuts at this point. I am freaking out. Is it me? Did I misread his hand? The board? Am I missing something? What the hell is going on?

Turn: 5♥

Brick city. Villain checks. I listen closely to the table talk. I have not misread his hand. He has TT. He has two outs. He needs to roll a natural 20 on a 20-sided die to beat me. Maybe he was calling out of spite on the flop. The dealer is still jawing. I want this pot. No floor, damn it. I shove for my remaining $260.

Villain calls. He calls! He calls!

Pot ($1025) - Heads up, One player is all-in.

I say to Villain, "You have some giant clanking balls sir. Hats off to you. If you get your ten, I will not even be mad." I am lying; I will be devastated if he gets his ten on the river. I know he is going to get it. I know it.

But this is not a story; this is the real world. The river is a brick.

Villain stacked off his remaining chips a few hands later and left, and after that the table started the postmortem on the hand. I figured that all the distraction from the prematurely revealed hands and whatnot had put him into a fey suicidal FU I Call mode, but his Albanian friend to my right had talked to him and said that he'd misread his hand. With his TT and the two 7s, he saw his two pair, and thought that with my A, I had only one pair, and he didn't understand that I had a higher two pair, which makes as much sense as anything.