Flamboyant Cuttlefish

Last night, contrary to my expectation of not being able to sustain the big gains I've been enjoying recently, I did just that. The hand that made my night was a set of kings; I won a huge pot of $103,800 with them. I was up head to head with the big stack at the table, and neither of us backed down. I ended up happily going all in. It was clear his mistake was a failure of imagination; I've made such mistakes often enough myself to know.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a really entertaining nature program on public television; it was focused on cuttlefish, and how the vast majority of the species of cuttlefish in the world use their ability to change color for purposes of camouflage. However, there is one species of cuttlefish which uses its ability to change color brazenly, as it broadcasts its presence to the world; appropriately, this species is called the flamboyant cuttlefish. The show highlighted the efforts of a marine biologist from Australia to try to explain this bizarre behavior; his hypothesis was that flamboyant cuttlefish are poisonous, and use color as a way to warn predators not to eat them. He was able to prove his hypothesis to be correct.

I didn't make the connection between flamboyant cuttlefish and big raises in poker right away, but since I did, I've become convinced of its aptness. A big raise is a way to tell your opponents, "Back off -- my hand is poison to you". Luckily for me, last night my flamboyance was mistaken for a bluff, and I extracted the maximum value I could from the hand.

delta: $63,600
balance: $793,940