John Turner

Someday, I will be a professional poker player. In the meantime, I play a lot of poker, read a lot of poker books, and watch a lot of poker on TV. All in the name of learning to be a better poker player.

Last night, I was watching the first hour of the 2008 Main Event on ESPN-HD and saw probably the most amazing hand I will ever, ever, see. While the hand went down at the Main Event a couple months ago, I don’t keep up on poker news every day so didn’t hear about it until seeing it on TV last night.

Mid position raises to 850. The button calls. AcQd9s flops. Both players check. The turn is 10d. Mid bets 1600. Button calls. River is Ad. Mid bets 2500. Button raises to 8500. Mid re-raises all in. Button calls.

Mid player (Motu Mabuchi) shows AA for quad aces. An absolute monster hand. Quads are a monster, anywhere, anytime, even quad deuces. Quad aces is the mother monster of all hands. That’s gotta be good enough to take it down in the Main Event, right? 99.99999% of the time, yes. But not this time. The button shows KdJd for the royal flush, the best poker hand possible, the stone cold absolute nuts on any table, anywhere, 100.00000% of the time. Talk about a bad beat!!!

So here’s the situation…I have a pretty common name. Not “John Smith” common, but with almost 5,000,000 hits, common enough. John Smith is about 36,000,000 hits, I’m 5 million, and my good friend’s name is only 16,000. So I’d say fairly common.

Anyway, waaaaaay back in the day when GMail was just an infant, I picked up the GMail ID johnturner. I figured I was pretty lucky to get it. This was 2004-ish. 4 years is a long time in Internet time…if we were talking geology and the age of the Earth, that would be like 500 million years ago.

Apparently, there are a bunch of John Turners out there in the world that think they also have the GMail ID johnturner. They don’t, because I have it, and I’m pretty diligent about a) changing my password regularly and b) making sure I pick a good password when I do it. I’m the only person using that email address. But I get several messages a day for OTHER John Turners. Email confirmations of orders, shipping confirmations, hotel reservation confirmations, airline confirmations, etc.

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