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 | Hot Bets
Tips from our SportsBook expert
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 | "How I Beat Ben Affleck"
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Once it got down to Facinelli and me, I knew I had it in the bag. He is such a nice guy, but he thought I was retarded. Here's what I did: The basic tell in poker, for an amateur opponent, is that if he doesn't have the cards, he looks at you, and if he does have a good hand, he looks away. So I decided to give out the opposite signals. When I had good cards, I looked right at Peter. I used that strategy through the rest of the first round, and I won.
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"Once it got down to Facinelli and me, I knew I had it in the bag."
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I also used a strategy called raise-check-raise. You raise, and the dealer turns over a card. You pretend that the new card didn't help you at all or that you had been looking for something else. And you say, "Aw, crap"; you check. I had a pair. I knew I was fine, but I checked, which made Peter feel confident. He put in a lot of money. Then I raised, and that screwed him up! Often, when people have put a lot of money in, they want to chase their money. So then he went all in, thinking, "Well, I'll scare her out." And then I met his own bet and I kicked him out.
For the first part of the game I didn't have great cards. I think I bet well. That's the thing. It's about figuring out your bets: scaring people off when you want to scare them off and bringing them in when you want to bring them in. That was how I won the first round.
The final was on Day 3 of our stint in Vegas. There had been a whole West Wing table in the preliminaries. I guess the West Wing people had just gotten trashed. The President of the United States was shit-faced. So when we were in hair and makeup, everyone is like, "Where is Richard Schiff?" He had just been asleep in his room, and I guess gone to sleep like two hours earlier. When he finally came in, you could just tell he was so hung over you just wanted to put him in your arms. He was in so much pain. I was thinking, "Okay, that's one competitor who's already out of the game."
Willie Garson from Sex and the City, meanwhile, came in feeling like the king of the hill because he'd just beaten Ben Affleck and David Schwimmer (Friends). I knew right away Willie was going to play really aggressively. When that happens, usually another guy will feel that testosterone and try to match it. So if you just let someone play aggressively and stay out of it, someone will knock himself out.
That's exactly what happened. Willie was knocked out in the first 15-20 minutes. He had come guns a-blazing, and the testosterone killed him right away. Then Richard went out because he was just hung over and couldn't play. So it was down to me, David Cross (Arrested Development) and Paul Rudd (Friends).
This is where the game turned. I'd been watching those guys, just observing--watching them pull their penises out on each other. During one hand, I notice that Paul looked at his cards and made a weird noise, like, "Hmmm, ch-ch-ch-choo," like he was thinking. As it turns out, he had really good cards, and he won that hand.
Right after that hand, we took a break. I said to Paul, "Man, you're so good. You do the same thing every time you look at your cards!" And I could see that in his head he's thinking, "Oh God, what did I just do?" He tried to reel me in after that. Every time he had good cards, he made that noise, and I played along.
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"David and I are at the same level: sort of mediocre and not very
aggressive."
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During the next break, I did some thinking. David and I are at about the same skill level--sort of mediocre and not very aggressive--but Paul is, in general, a better player. I realized that if the game were down to David and me, I could suddenly turn it on, play really aggressively and win. Plus, I just liked Dave. And so Dave and I did a little teaming up against Paul, trying to bully him a little bit.
I was doing the best I could and managed to stay in the game, but the cards I was getting really didn't seem good enough for me to go all the way. But then I just got lucky again. I pulled two cards and got an inside straight. It was ridiculous luck. If you watch the footage, everyone's face is like, "Oh. My. God." So that's how Paul got knocked out.
So then I thought, "I lucked into this, I might as well just play my cards." I went in really aggressively against David, and then I just chipped away, and the next thing you know, I won.
I am totally going to watch this next season of Celebrity Poker Showdown, but I'm not coming back. Go out a winner, you know what I mean? If there are a bunch of winners that play, maybe I will go back in. The stars that need to align for someone to win something like this, it's so ridiculous that I don't think I could do it.
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