Ye Olde Poker X Town Square Is On Fire This Week

Ye Olde Poker X Town Square is on fire this week, and the kindling is a $1/2 cash game hand from The Lodge Card Club in Texas that generated more discourse than most WSOP final tables.

Here’s what actually happened, no pitchforks required. Abby Merk - poker player, content creator and CoinPoker ambassador - raised to $50 from the hijack in a livestreamed hand. The cutoff 3-bet to $150. A player named Susan, who’d limped under the gun, called, and Merk 4-bet shoved for $821. The cutoff folded. Susan tanked.

“Do you want action?” Susan asked, weighing the call.

“Not really,” Merk answered. Honestly. A little too honestly - she was behind in the hand. Susan called anyway, they agreed to run it twice, and neither board saved her. Merk lost the stack and, on camera, asked for the table minimum: “What’s the minimum I can buy in for? I don’t really want to play anymore.”

That clip did the numbers a clip like that does. Millions of views, and a reaction that treated a tilted response to a self-inflicted spot like a felony. Matt Berkey weighed in on the side of the other player: “Poor Susan. What a ridiculous reaction to a self inflicted wound.” Comedian and player Caitlin Comeskey watched the pile-on happen in real time and posted her own verdict on the whole environment: “I’m fucking done y’all. Being one of the most prominent women in poker in 2026 is fucking torture. You win. Fuck y’all. I quit.”

Merk answered on Instagram. She and Susan, she said, have played together a long time - “I thought we were friends, or, at least, closer friends than she may have thought” - and in the moment she answered the question the way you’d answer a friend, not an opponent. She copped to being tilted and said the small rebuy was about protecting her bankroll in that state of mind, not a dig at anyone.

Susan’s own statement didn’t paint Merk as a villain either: “If I folded as Abby asked because we are friends, that would be collusion… I owe the player, the game and myself a fair decision.” She also backed up that Merk’s version of events was told straight.

So: two players who like each other, a completely legal piece of table talk, an unlucky river run twice, and a tilted reaction that got read online as a tantrum. Somewhere in there, the actual story got replaced by the town square’s verdict. Merk closed her own post the way poker’s been closing this exact kind of story since Hellmuth and Tony G: “That’s poker, Phil.”

Judge the hand yourself - here’s the clip, as shared by the WPT:

was this poker player right to be upset about this poker hand? 🤔

- WPT (@WPT) September 20, 2026

Cover illustration by Ray Zorfold (@rayzorfold).