Hi guys, I haven't written any articles for pocketfives in quite a while, but I recently got involved in a thread where I ended up accidentally writing what may have been the best post I've written in a while. The thread was pretty typical. You see them everyday. A thread where someone mentions that they can't handle all the bad beats and suckouts that come with low-stakes poker, and want to either find a site where the players are better in general, or wants to move up in stakes, either way, the goal being to find opponents who don't play so stupidly, and dish bad beats out all the time. <READMORE>

Normally I either ignore these posts, since there are just too many of them, and I don't feel like making the same response more or less to all of them, or I write some generic response about how bad opponents are a good thing, and the gross mistakes they make, going strongly against the odds/math of it all are what is actually making you money in the long run. This time though, I'm not sure why, I decided to really put together a post that wouldn't just explain that it is good for your opponents to suck horribly at poker, but more importantly, how to PROPERLY abuse them. I began to realize...

It isn't some constant stream of bad beats that is making people create these threads. Bad luck only lasts so long. Eventually if you are playing winning poker you win. It's that simple. So pretty much, the only people who are really making these threads because they are honestly taking a lot of bad beats, and their massive initial downswing of variance is crippling them, are people who havent played very many hands yet online. The vast majority however are NOT these people. They are people who HAVE played a lot of hands online, in fact, enough hands to where they should DEFINITELY be up by now, they are past any reasonable swing of variance. The reason these people THINK they are losing is that they are having horrid luck, for an unreal period of time. The REAL reason they are losing is that they are actually playing losing poker, without even realizing it.

But how could this be? How could they not, somehow, deep inside, know that they are playing losing poker? Easy answer... They don't realize they are playing losing poker because they are playing the way most people say you are SUPPOSED to play. The only problem is that they are playing very low stakes poker, where text-book proper play is actually often a losing strategy.

What????!!!?!?????

Yep, thats right. Although a lot of the time, you will break even, or make marginal profits using a textbook strategy for a small stakes no limit ring game, you will often be at a table where the correct strategy is NOT textbook. This is when your opponents are truly horrific players. One really needs to adjust their play to actually make money off total donks. You can actually lose money if you play textbook against truly awful opponents, and you need to know what kinds of adjustments to make if you want to beat them. Everyone always says a table full of donks is OBVIOUSLY the most profitable table you can sit at.... the problem is though... its a little less obvious than most people realize. It is only more profitable if you know how to play them properly.

Here was my response in the thread:

http://www.pocketfives.com/E2614A29-...0AF5FBCE3.aspx

Looking back on the respone I gave, I guess it didn't really mention all the various adjustments one needs to make in order to adjust to bad players... there are many many countless details and nuances, and I only mentioned a couple, but I do think it served the purpose of getting people to REALIZE that they need to adjust their strategy based on the types of players they are up against, and understand that a style of play that might work very well in a 2/4nl game might not work very well at all in a 0.10/0.25nl game. It is a disservice to tell someone that they should strive to find tables of crappy opponents. One must mention that in ADDITION to finding bad opponents, one must know how to best take advantage of their opponents mistakes to make any money off them. That is really the key.
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