One of my good personal traits has always been my ability to be empathic, to be able to look at things from another person's perspective and understand where they are coming from. However, I have never been able to really understand the freeroll mentality. I think the closest I have been able to come was the time I left in the middle of a tournament that I was leading.
I had just took down a huge pot, after raising with something like A-Q suited. I had a few limpers in front of me, so I made it 5x. I bet out after flopping Qs. I fired again after improving to aces up on the turn. One of the two players still in the hand came over the top of me for all their chips. The other guy called. I figured one them had an ace and the other was probably on a straight draw. It turned out that one of them had a queen with a weak kicker and the other actually was on a draw. My hand held up on the river and I won nice pot.
I didn't triple up because I already quite a few more chips than either of the two players, but pot was big enough catapult me from 4th place into the chip lead. But rather than be pleased, I was going "screw this". Before that hand I had already been wondering why these people kept calling me with these garbage hands. I had played very few hands. When I played a hand, I had always raised. And every time a hand had gone to showdown I had turned over a strong hand that had started from playing a strong starting hand. Then I remembered that I was playing a freeroll.
So before that hand went down, I had already been thinking that I was wasting my time participating in a bingo game. Taking over the chip lead might have changed some people's minds. But winning that last pot, and the way it had played out, only reinforced the feeling that I didn't want bother with this donkathon.
Another player, that I had exchanged friendly words with in the past, had just congratulated me on a nice hand. I thanked him in my standard manner, "preciate it", before continuing on with "but it just occurred to me that I am playing a freeroll and that I could be using this time to do just about anything else... like sorting and filing receipts in preparation for doing next years taxes". I then announced that "I'm going to let you guys have it", and wished him good luck. He asked if I was leaving, in what I took to be disbelief and pointed out that I was the chip leader. I said I knew and wished him good luck again, then clicked sit out.
Okay, so here's the thing. In that moment I could almost relate to the freeroll mentality in the sense that I couldn't care less about playing in it. If I had ran into trips in that last pot, or been sucked out on, it wouldn't have bothered me in the least. I had already come to the realization that I didn't care. I realized that it was just a donkey bingo game and that the payout wasn't really worth the time and aggravation. But that was as close as I could get, because my thing is that I would rather not play at all than to play bad, or at least any worse than I do normally.
So the thing that I can never really understand is why people bother to play if they're just going to play bad. I'm not talking about the guys who don't know any better, the one's who don't really understand the game well enough to realize how bad they really play. I'm talking about the ones that have some understanding of the game, but choose not to demonstrate it, using the excuse that "it's just a freeroll" to explain atrocious play. If you're not going to make an effort to play well, than why bother at all. Why not do something else?
