I played my first Venetian deep stack of the season last week. It was the usual mix of live players. The 3 seat had one goal, which was to find ways of informing the table he was used to playing a lot higher. After the dealer announced that both hands in an all-in at the river had to be tabled -- neither hand being the 3 seat's - he shouted that they hadn't had that rule at the WSOP.

The player to my right, meanwhile, was pretty decent except that he seemed to think everyone at the table wanted to play the 3/4/5-bet game with him even though no one was. In the hand before the one I reference in the title, he opens to $850 on the button at $200-$400-$50, and the tight big blind made it $3k. He shoved for an additional $7k effective, got snap-called, and seemed annoyed as he was forced to table K7o and lost to AJ (which had to be about the bottom of the big blind's range).

So, the title hand:

Blinds: $200-$400-$50

Action: UTG limps, MP1 limps, cutoff shoves $6k, I call for $3400 with JTs on the button.

A brief pause in the narrative. UTG was a loose-passive recreational player. MP1 was a wild Italian player playing something like 90/20, and while I thought he might make an insane call against one all-in, facing two shoves I thought he'd be pretty likely to fold. And after spewing off his stack the previous hand, I thought the cutoff could be on a super-wide range. If I got it heads-up against him, which seemed pretty likely if I called, I'd be getting 3:2 against a range wide enough that I thought I had quite a bit more than the 40% equity I needed.

So that was my brilliant master plan, which seemed to have merit as the cutoff did indeed flip 75s when it came time. But there was one aspect I hadn't counted on. When it got back to the Italian in MP1, he picked up his horse card protector, smiled drunkenly at it, and said, "What's that horsey? You tell me to make bad call here? Okay!" And he tossed in his chips.

He had A7s so it wasn't actually that bad a spot for me even though I busted, and at least the table (myself included) got a kick out of hearing him do the horse voice.