A new post on an old favorite subject of mine – the idiots who think it is ‘cool’ and ‘smart’ to berate fish at the poker tables. This is a mixed games tale, for more of my writing on this subject you can pop over to Omaha Planet and check out the Mixed Game Poker section. Anyway, as usual the end of a busy day running the Planet Corp saw me relaxing with a game of cards – this time the $50 buy-in 8-game mix on Stars, a fun combo with 6 hands of each of the 8 different games. One particular player at the table was loose, passive and generally very bad, he entered most pots and only ever bet with the nuts or close to it, but called with any hand or draw – a strategy guaranteed to lose money fast. And guess what, he lost it fast, dropping half a stack or so and then reloading on 3 occasions in the 30 minutes I was there.
A seat becomes vacant and a new player arrives, he wins a reasonable pot in no-limit Holdem against our passive fish and then starts to say ‘great call with K-5 off, lol’ in the chat box, a few more ‘lols’ during the PLO round then something along the lines of “great to have a such a donating idiot at the tables’, in less than 10 minutes a player who had spewed almost $100 to the table very quickly sat out and then left. Our new guy laughed once more (can’t recall exactly) but something like ‘haha, what a moron he was’. I said nothing (temped though I was!) but was seething inside. Our new player had not only cost himself money and cost the rest of the players at the table money – but he was sitting somewhere in the world thinking he was a smart guy for doing it. Yes, he really thought he was smart. T
he retard that chased away our fish is not unique, there are 1000’s more just waiting to make their tables less profitable. What gets me the most is that they are probably educated, able to solve math problems and operate computers – but lack the psychological ability to step back and see the bigger picture… to me it is like these people are living in a bubble, and to be honest the fact that so many of them exist in the world (as well as in poker) is a concern for me. Ah well, there will be more days and more fish – that is not really the problem. If this post just stops one person from making their table less profitable it will have fulfilled its purpose!
GL at the Tables, Mark
Submitted by Planet Mark on Mon, 12/14/2009 - 11:02