The In-Zeid Scoop

BY CORY ZEIDMAN
Please Shut Up!

IT’S QUITE POSSIBLE THAT I talk more than anybody you’ve ever played with at a poker table. I like to have a good time while I play and am able to still maintain maximum concentration while chattering away. One of the fringe benefits of doing a lot of talking at the table is that it can take some people off their game. The “noise” bothers them. They should eat my shorts. If they don’t like it, they should stick to online poker (which I’m sure some do). As far as I’m concerned, talk at a poker table should almost be mandatory. In the Old West, I’m sure table talk led to some heads getting blown off, but hey, it made for plenty of interesting stories, so it was worth it.

I am smart enough, though, to shut up if I’m bothering the wrong person (e.g., the “fish”). Another thing I won’t do is make inappropriate comments that could screw up a hand. Unfortunately, with the current poker boom, with all the TV cameras going and with players becoming household names, some of them don’t know how to shut their mouths when it’s necessary.

Simple rules to follow: If you’re not in a hand, don’t comment on anything to do with the hand until it’s over; if you’re in a multi-way pot, don’t comment on anything concerning what you think until the hand becomes heads up. It gets really nauseating when you watch some of the star players break these simple rules, and the problem isn’t that these players don’t know better; it’s that some of them are so full of themselves that they think for some twisted reason the TV audience or the other players at the table want to hear their words of wisdom.

A perfect example that I’m sure many of you have seen was during the U.S. Poker Championship at the Taj Mahal a couple of years ago. There was a hand involving Amnon “Eric” Filippi and Mark Seif. I’ve played with both, and I’d rather have a nasty paper cut on my tongue. Anyway, there was a very important all-in hand taking place at their table. Two guys were hooked up in a situation where the first guy to act post-flop moved in on an open-ended straight draw (a semi-bluff), and the other player was contemplating a call for a while (he also had a draw—a bigger straight draw with two overcards). The call would have cost him about 20 percent of his stack, and as he was deliberating, the two geniuses, Filippi and Seif, started bantering about the hand, making totally inappropriate comments.

Look, people are playing with millions of dollars at stake. No one, and I mean no one, is bigger than the game. And that includes Jamie Gold, who really brought this issue to the forefront during his World Series Main Event title run in 2006 when he repeatedly made inappropriate comments during hands with three or more players involved.

In cash games, you tend to witness this behavior particularly often. You see people feeling a need to comment as they muck or call while others are still waiting their turn to act. Heads up in a hand, I personally feel that all comments are fair game. But when three or more are in a hand, there should be very strict penalties for talking out of line.

I am a huge proponent of table talk. But it has to be done within the confines of the rules.

Cory Zeidman can be reached at CSZALLIN@aol.com.