Poker holds a special place in the public imagination. While other forms of gambling are certainly comparatively popular, there’s nothing quite like everyone’s favorite card game.
This is in no small part due to quasi-glamorous portrayals of poker in entertainment media. Firmly entrenched in pop culture by the 1980s, poker has become ubiquitous in gambling spaces, iconic films, and even in casual social settings.
And while a mysterious stranger challenging you to a poker match sounds like the plot of an ’80s flick, it actually happened to one woman.
She Gets An Offer To Play Poker
In a video first posted on Apr. 28 that now has over 8,000 views, author, content creator, and former exotic dancer Sherra Soto (@sherrasoto304) shared her wild encounter with said mysterious stranger. He allegedly propositioned her during one of her nightlife shifts in Florida. Soto says her home base was Atlanta, but that “dancing in Atlanta kind of sucked,” so she would still pop over to Florida to “work certain weekends.”
“So I’m on stage and it’s my first stage set of the night and this guy comes up and he tips me at $20, and he’s like ‘Come see me when you’re done,’” Soto says in her video. “I’m like, ‘Oh hell yeah, you got it’ … When I get offstage, I go over there, and I start talking to him. We’ll just call him ‘David.’”
Soto says that at the time of her conversation with “David,” she was an avid poker player. She played “tournament style in Atlanta almost every night.”
David introduced himself as a former New Orleans poker dealer (and current real estate investor) and asked Soto to play together sometime. When Soto revealed she wasn’t local to Florida, David didn’t bat an eye. He invited her to play, tournament-style, that very night.
Soto agreed, but said they should give the game some real stakes. She offered to make it a bet.
They Set Their Terms
“I was like, ‘Well, if I win, you have to pay me $800,’” Soto says. “Because that’s pretty much what I would have made tonight, working. And he’s like, ‘OK, if I win, then you have to give me a BJ.’”
Soto says she had no intention of doing him that particular favor, no matter what the outcome of the game. However, now she certainly needed to win.
The pair relocated to one of David’s properties, complete with his own poker room. They both invited a handful of friends, and the game began.
“Luckily, I’m very familiar with that part of Florida,” Soto says. “So I knew where I was going and that it was in a safe area. So I had a couple guys come over, and we’re all playing. It came down to me and David.”
By around 6 or 7 a.m., the sun had risen, Soto had the majority of the chips, and she found herself with a full house. She went all in, so did he, and they flipped their cards—all he had was a pair of twos.
Soto had won.
“I was like, ‘You gotta pay up, [expletive],’” Soto finishes. “I never lose.”
What Is Tournament-Style Poker?
Poker isn’t the world’s most popular card game for no reason—its versatility lends itself to a variety of formats, settings and play styles. While there are a ton of ways to play poker, two forms stand out: tournament and cash games.
According to online poker room GG Games, “in cash games, players can buy in for varying amounts within betting limits, and chips represent real money that can be cashed out at any time.” But in many poker tournaments, “your buy-in gets you a fixed starting stack, and those chips only have value within the tournament structure itself.”
However, that’s not to say you can’t play for real money, which is exactly what Soto and her adversary did. Poker blog GTO Wizard explains in more detail that the difference between tournament style poker and cash games actually lies in the use of specific mechanics and strategies—especially antes, which “are a common feature in multi-table tournaments (MTTs), but they are not as common in cash games.” The value of folding also increases in tournament games as a result.
“Antes are a type of forced bet that all players are required to pay before the start of the hand,” GTO Wizard writes.
They continue, “Antes increase the size of the starting pot, which gives all players a larger prize to fight for and can incentivize them to play more hands from every position … Antes cause players to contest pots with weaker hands compared to a game without antes. The source of the ante is not important, only the size.”
We reached out to Soto via TikTok comment.
