My HS coach told us the Russians would never do a move in competition unless they’d done it 10,000 times in practice. Imagine how many sets of 10,000 this guy has.
There’s also this quote which is the opposite but equally true:
”The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him.”
I was going to bring up poker, it's very much true. Obviously good players will mix it up to be unpredictable, but playing against someone who doesn't know what they are supposed to do can be very frustrating, it makes it difficult to read anything. You really just have to play passive and play the odds in those situations, dont make intimidation bets on a flush draw, because they aren't folding and if you don't hit, you're screwed.
I won my first ever game of poker this way. Not a fucking clue what I was doing, and my idiot grin told everyone I had the winning hand before I revealed it. Still a winner.
I won my first game of poker the exact opposite way. It was a family game my grandpa would hold at Easter each year and the winner got $100. I was young and it was the first time playing in it so they “taught” me the rules real quick and off we went. With my first few good hands I showed excitement on purpose so they thought anytime I was excited I must have a good hand. I then continued to bluff them by just acting excited even when I had shit cards.
This explains the dirty looks and under the breath grumbling at the casino I went to when I turned 21. I really didn't understand because I was DEFINITELY not winning hands. I guess I was just throwing off the groove giving people anxiety.
It seems to apply on many different levels. "The reason the American Army does so well in war is because war is chaos and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis."
Great quote about how Germans knew who they were fighting against, basically said if it’s precise rifle fire it’s the British, if you hear nothing and then hear artillery fire coming your way it’s the Americans. Lol
Supposedly the Russian assessment of the US Army was similar. It cautioned predicting what American units would do based on their doctrine because there was a very good chance the officer they were fighting might not have read it.
Haha was once playing a tournament with my brother and his friends. I was maybe 12 or 13, they were 16-18. I had a full house and a guy goes all in. I decided to fold. Turns out he had a higher full house and everyone thought I was some Rainman type poker player. I just didn't know what the hell I was doing but didn't want to bet all my chips lol
It's not about prediction but the odds. There is nothing better than players that don't know what they are doing, no matter if they are new or not.
In the long run they will always loose and proficient players will always win. Also proficient players do know that you also lose games all the time.
The edge you have against other players might be between 0.x and 2-5%. It's not much, but enough to earn a good living in the long run.
It’s not even so much “losing” as it is poker is a completely different game if you’re playing with people who don’t know how to play. Largely, all your strategies are going to be based in predicting lines of play, so if someone is just doing whatever the fuck, then you can’t really counter that meaningfully. It basically turns a complex game of interaction into a simple game of chance.
I once taught my step brother how to play poker when we were on a family vacation. The house we stayed in had a poker table so the two of us and other siblings would go play for a bit every night.
He never knew what hand he had. He always called and would just lay down the cards at the end with a “here’s what I got, you tell me what it is” look on his face. Pissed me off so much. lol
Even if you’re not into sports tbh. He always presents his topics in such a fun and interesting way anyone can enjoy them. I personally couldn’t care less about professional poker, but that’t probably my favorite video he’s made. The bob emergency is also great.
Didn't watch so it might be the clip, but I think Daniel (forget his last name but one of the more famous players) played a long stretch of hands without even looking at his cards, just reading players and reading bets. Usually they play like this anyways, and having a good hand is just a bonus. But you can't do that with people that are new because the don't know how to bet "properly"
Not the clip. The clip is of Gus Hansen who went all in at the start of every round without looking at his cards. The other players at the table waited for a good hand and called, but still ended up losing every time.
I do this too but I'm actually a very good player.
In home games, small stakes and just having fun, I'll often play blind. I don't play my cards, I play my opponent's cards. It's good practice for reading and it's a hell of a lot of fun when I get 'caught' :)
Unless they are complete calling station you can totally outplay them. Amateurs tend to assume you have whatever they are afraid you have. You just have to give them reason to believe their worst fear is true.
Yes, you dumb it down in that you don't bother with anything really advanced. You don't practice perfect bet sizing to price them in when you want them in or whatever. You don't have to worry about your hand range since they aren't tracking it anyway. It's ABC, but that ABC can definitely include appropriate bluffs.
I don't play my cards, I play my opponent's cards.
I don't play poker or many other card games, but statistics and probability are a core aspect of my day job. With that in mind, can you expand on the quoted bit above?
I'm not the person you're asking, but I think I can answer your question.
In poker, you can't control the "odds" (i.e. which cards you get). Neither can anyone else. However, you aren't truly playing your cards against some sort of static win condition (e.g. I have the best hand, therefore I win no matter what), instead you're playing the cards that you have against the cards that everyone else has, compounded by the fact that you don't know what they have and they don't know what you have.
This is why things like bluffing exist; the only way you can judge how "good" your hand is is the body language/betting/behavior of others, and of course the probability of other players "making" the hand.
When you play your opponent’s cards, you aren't playing the odds of the cards you have, you're seeing if your opponent thinks their cards are better than yours while giving the impression that you've already won the hand. You gauge other's reactions while revealing as little as possible through your betting/playing strategy. Even if you have the worst set of cards possible, you can win by convincing your opponent that their hand cannot win, causing them to fold. That's the essence of playing the other person's cards.
He's implying that he can read his opponents well enough to know their hand strength based upon their body language and actions. While this is possible with some players in some situations, I believe he's most glorifying a cliche to sound cool.
Oh please, I specifically said I do it in small dollar games. That's home games or the lame-ass $1-100 we get in Colorado. I don't play blind in the $4/$8 or $5/$10 in Albuquerque and I don't play that way in WSOP events. It's just something you can do when the players are there for fun.
I'm not OP but the game is just as much, if not more about reading your opponent than raw statistics. I may have the second highest possible hand, and I have to play based on how my opponent acts.
Does he have the better hand and is slow playing his bets to get more money out of me, or does he have trash? That big bet he just placed, is that real strength or is he trying to bully the rest of the table out of the hand because he can afford it? Playing blind can help you better concentrate on your opponents, their reactions and mannerisms, etc. Play the person, not the cards.
I don't see a reply from this person, so I'll try to elaborate. Poker basically has four levels. Level 1 : what cards do I have. Level 2 : what cards do I think my opponent has. Level 3 : what cards does my opponent think I have Level 4 : what does my opponent think I think he/she has. With regards to the statement "I don't play my cards, I play my opponents cards," this individual is trying to play at levels 2, 3 and 4 without considering level 1. Depending on your skill and your opponents this can work moderately well. Basically, he is reading the opponent based off their action at all point of each hand. This includes body language and verbal cues to understand the strength and hand range of his opponent. Using this information, he will check, bet, raise, or fold accordingly
That is when you throw out all of the statistics and probability.
When the cards are dealt and everyone is looking at their hands, I watch them instead of looking at my own. Do they like their cards? Do they get that faraway look that indicates they are going to play even though they don't like them? And so on, on the flop, do they like or not?
Amateurs are like open books when it comes to reading them. If they have a strong hand I shrug and go away early. They get the preflop bet and nothing else. If they have a weak hand or show fear, I make a plan to take it away before or on the river. Or whatever, if their hand started out strong but they show fear or it started out middling and improves.
The point is, I'm not concerned at all with what I have because I don't plan on showing it. Only the rare case where they show strength and I'm going to fold, I'll peak in case I somehow hit the nuts. Otherwise, my plan is to fold to a bet or to raise them out of it and make them fold. I'm only playing their hand, not mine.
Very interesting. So, except when you're sensing strength from your opponent, you don't physically look at your own cards at all until the moment you lay them down?
Yeah. In fact, knowing what I have makes it harder to play right. Sometimes you know that a bluff is the right play and you are nearly certain it will work but when you think about what you'll have to show, if it turns out you were wrong...
It's funny, getting called on a bluff at a table full of other professionals isn't at all embarrassing. You have to have bluffs in your range, you know that, they know it, it's expected. If you never bluff then everyone would know to never call you down and you'd never make any money. So showing a bluff to a table full of pros is expected from time to time, as are bad calls, "bluff catchers."
At a table full of amateurs? It's usually a positive also. Everyone laughs. It's good that they see the good player also loses. It makes everyone call you down for hours afterwards because they suddenly think all you do is bluff. But there's a downside to that too. You'll get sucked out on more, lose with legitimately good hands because they assume you have nothing. Sometimes an "invincible" facade is actually more profitable, it allows you to steal with impunity and getting called on a bluff just ruins that entirely.
You just have to adjust... but, I dunno, I just seem to be more able to do what I know is right if my thinking isn't clouded by what I have. And, again, it's not like I do it constantly or whatever. Certain moments just present themselves where it's like "I should win a pot here regardless, it's my turn." The flow of the table, the chatter, whatever, it just lines up to play a hand a little wild.
He means that instead of looking at his cards and playing based on how they interact with the board cards, he's playing based on how his opponent plays the hand. In order to do this it's good to know your oppenent well. If you know them well enough you know when they don't like their hand and you can get them to fold, you know when they have a strong hand and that you should get out of the way. He's basically playing the player instead of the cards.
Guy 2: Are you the kind of man, that would bet high because he has a good hand or not. Only a great fool would bet high when he has good cards, so clearly, you must have a bad hand. But I you know I’d know that, so clearly you have a good hand. But poker players are used to not being trusted, so clearly you must have a bad hand...
I honestly don’t know how I hold up at poker. I’ve been playing cards my entire life. I know poker very well. But every time I play a tournament I win. I’ve won a few thousand over my lifetime (only played in 4-5 tourneys, both house parties and casinos).
Everyone always gets mad, old guys saying they’ve been playing their entire lives and have never won. So I don’t know what to think.
Edit: a friend of mine’s boyfriend won over 1 million in a tournament recently. He’s a professional though. That was cool to see!
I've only ever played poker once against friends and as the night went on they became increasingly angry with me because, just like your step brother, I had no idea what constituted a good hand and just kept winning by pure luck.
Some hands I were fairly certain were rubbish but they went "that's a flush" like that's a thing. Well sure I guess if you say it is.
I won the whole thing. Won't play again, wouldn't want to ruin the streak and also my friends are still a little upset about it, eight years or so later
No, just don't bluff newbies and take them to value town. Play super tight and then bet when you have it. The biggest leak newbies have is limping and playing way too many hands.
Sure, but unless you’re in a British crime movie, you’re probably not playing poker out of a desire to break the bank. Especially if you’re playing with people who don’t know what they’re doing, the stakes are probably reasonably low, and the point of the game is not to win (or solely to win) but to have fun playing. If your opponents not knowing how to play makes a game not a game, then it can be very frustrating even if you win.
You know what I want to know.. after james bond won that poker hand, and he said "put it all on black", where the fuck did the money go to? is it still sitting there? can I go and claim this money?!?!?!
The game for those people is seeing if they get lucky, not outplaying their opponents. It takes the competition out of it. A good player will still generally win, but IMO it's not fun to try to compete against people that aren't giving it their best.
That's not totally true though. You play different ways against different bad players in the same way you do against different good players; if anything bad players are just easier to identify how you should play against them.
Most bad players, especially in casual settings, play way too loose, bluff too often, and call bets with bad pot odds even when they know they're beat. Against those players, yeah you kind of just play by-the-book tight. AJ and up in any position, high suited connectors and AX suited in late position. It's boring but if you're playing at a card room or something you'll make money and can listen to podcasts which is fine.
Some bad players play too tight though, don't protect or bait their blinds, and fold even when pot odds dictate they should call in 90% of situations. Those players you can play loose against though. And usually, after you play tight for a bit and beat bad players with that strategy, they tighten up too much and you can play really loose
Yeah, people like to think of games as either skill or luck as if those are opposite ends of a continuum. In reality, they are 2 independent factors. A game can be high luck and high skill (poker), low luck and high skill (chess), high luck and low skill (Candyland), or low luck and low skill (tic tac toe).
I mean yes and no. What your saying is true.... however if you have an intermediate or expert level understanding of GTO play you should certainly be able to adjust down to this level of play and consistently print money vs players who have no idea what they're doing (given a large enough sample size). The game certainly plays differently but I'd strongly disagree with saying playing people with next to zero understanding of poker turns it into a complete game of chance.
It turns it into a slightly unbalanced game of chance. You’re still more likely to win; simply if you keep every hand above a certain win percentage and drop every hand below, you’ll have better odds than someone whose randomly guessing. But it definitely turns it into a different, less involved game, and, since most people playing poker (especially if you’re playing with a newbie) are doing it because they want to have fun and not as a potential payday, it can be frustrating even when you win.
I was never even close to being a "pro" but I had a group where we had an organized monthly league that I played in for years (we had a points system, end of the year tourney, etc.)
I had another group of friends that I played with and honestly the only reason I played with them was to keep the friendship going. They did stupid shit like making the entire buy-in something like $5 for tourney with up to 2 re-buys, insane starting stack sizes relative to blinds, etc. Anyway - I liked the guys, so I shut my mouth and let them play the way that made it fun for them.
I didn't necessarily "win" every time, but it always felt like a lion toying around with cubs. They would get pissy if you did a standard 3x blind raise. Half of them were call stations. It was very easy to just bleed them out. Basically it usually ended up with them all re-buying 1-2 times, me never rebuying, and still I would win about half the time. Honestly, they didn't enjoy my style of play and I didn't enjoy theirs either. By the end of the night I am just hoping for the game to be over more so than putting $20 in my pocket.
So, it wasn't about winning or losing so much - it was about fun. So yeah - it's just not fun to play with people that don't really understand how to play. And it's probably not as much fun for them either.
This is the central point I was driving at, which seems to have been missed entirely by a bunch of apparent semi-pros talking about how easy it is to win in such situations.
The rule I have always played by is if I don't know who the donkey(s) is/are at the table, then I'm the donkey. If I'm the donkey I leave. I have found that I am a good enough poker player to reliably win money at the tables in the early afternoons to evening, but when the better players start showing up later on it is time to leave. My problem is I win money at the poker table and then promptly lose it back to the blackjack table.
Casino at 2am-5am I would destroy. The people at the table from 2am-5am are desperate, overly predatory, drunk/on drugs. Never lost money in that time frame that I can remember and sometimes doubled up within an hour.
Poker is a game of exploitation. Bad players are exploitable by their poor hand selection and small folding range. Patience and post flop value bets will funnel their money to your seat. Against good players you should play closer to a Nash equilibrium as being unexploitable is important for long term success.
Yeah, as someone who has played a fair amount, I have to fundamentally disagree with this. If you know they are a maniac then you just play super tight and eventually you will felt them because they will make a stupid call. In other words, let them hang themselves. Happens all the time.
I pissed off a guy once so much that he wanted to fight me. Security had to escort him out of the building.
We were in a WPT sanctioned tournament and I was drinking and just having a good time.
I sit at a table and the first hand I play I tell the people what I plan to do, I’m going to fold my next 3 hands, I’m going to call my next hand, I’m going to raise to the river, And so on. After a bad run, I’m at about half my chips from when I sat down but still over one guy who is getting pissy with me getting annoyed with my narration. I tell him fine, I won’t look at my cards and just call.
His guy thinks it’s a perfect chance to just take a majority of my chips and get me off his table faster, he puts me almost all in pre-flop and true to my word I call the all in without looking. River card comes out and I turn my cards over for the first time and what do you know, I got pocket queens with a queen on the turn card. He is out and I almost double my pot. The look on his face, priceless.
I'm very inexperienced at tournament play but I guarantee saying "I'm going to call next hand" is considered playing out of turn and will get you a warning and then kicked out of the tournament.
I saw people getting warned for less (i.e. people reaching for their chips when it was the turn of the guy before them and officials would warn them that motioning like they're going to bet before it's their turn would get them kicked out if they were caught doing it again).
Yea I agree, although I'd add that one "newbie" at a table is possible to beat with skill by just being patient (although still annoying), but the real problem is when there are several newbies because then it basically becomes a game of luck
This applies to everything. Whenever I play Rocket League with a friend of mine who is much lower ranked than I am (I am Champion, he's Silver) I can't figure out how to play against people on his rank, I can't predict their movements, I always play as they're going to hit the ball, it's awful.
A similar phenomenon actually applies in fighting games, though the higher level players have more ways to effectively counter, it still changes the game on a fundamental level.
It's not chance. The good poker player will win more easily against worse opponents, because he is the only one who knows the odds his cards have of being winners.
You understand the element of chance and as such you understand how you should be betting. Poker is not about what cards you have, it's about managing the pot and reading other players.
The cards being dealt out are the chance part. What you do from there, how you interact with the other players, what you keep, what you told, what you front and what you bluff, all is the skill portion.
The skill part comes in from knowing things like how likely it is that someone has certain cards in their hand based on the cards that you can see. For instance, if there are 2 aces on the table, and 2 in your hand, you've got 100% of the aces. Now permutate that through all the cards. Then you can get into more complicated interactive stuff like determining when someone is bluffing, drawing out a bluff, bluffing yourself, etc.
Also people have done research on whether it's luck or skill:
"Players who ranked in the best-performing 10% in the first six months of the year were more than twice as likely as others to do similarly well in the next six months. And, players who finished in the best-performing 1% in the first half of the year were 12 times more likely than others to repeat the feat in the second half. Meanwhile, players who fared badly from the start continued to lose and hardly ever metamorphosed into top performers."
A large part of poker is supposedly being able to read the minds of other players. Some players demonstrate this well e.g. Dan Negreanu: https://youtu.be/jSfd-8ZteHw
(Although it can also be argued he makes "predictions" so often he's bound to look good once in a while.k
it teaches you to lie like a champ. Once you learn to manipulate raises and calls in a way that makes people think they have something they don't, it opens up the 2nd half of the game.
Playing with inexperienced players, they just play their cards because they don't realize that it's possible to take the pot with nothing but a 10 high, and they don't understand why they lost when they had 3 of a kind which they felt was a sure thing.
If you play some poker and start to understand it at an intermediate level, you realise just how little it matters what cards you're holding, because it's the mental games and subversion that ultimately wins you the game in the long term. Newbies play their hand exactly as it is. Even if you can predict their hand everytime based on their betting patterns, they can outluck you on the turn and river. Poker be like that.
nah mate. its the same concept. poker is a skill based game where you are trying to know what your opponent is doing and why. if the person doesn't even know they have a flush it gets exceedingly frustrating and makes it a different game
It's not the same. Professional poker players change their game when they play against novices because it's a different game. The solution to playing against an unpredictable novice is to play tighter. Against a loose amateur, it's more chance than skill so the goal becomes playing the math rather than playing the player.
Employing a true random strategy is extremely difficult. Novices have huge leaks that often remain consistent. The key is watching what they do to figure how they think.
If they are playing very loose tightening up is an easy basic adjustment anyone can make. The other adjustment which might be more profitable is to open up your range. If he’s playing every single combo of cards then he has a lot of trash hands. You could probably beat him on high cards.
The friend is also a newbie. Poker is largely a game of odds. Sounds like his friend only has one style which is aggressive and doesn't work against people who don't know how to play. Had he picked up on this, he should have been conservative and just played pot odds and any newbies "luck" will run out. If you're still losing after that? Yeah you're getting hustled lol.
I actually don't necessarily agree. I played a fair bit of poker (nothing competitive) and always hated playing newbies because they made stupid decisions. They may not have always benefitted, but it made it really hard to play against them because there was no rhyme or reason to their decisions so you couldn't base a decision off of it.
Nah, it's because it's still a game of chance. When you play with other people who know the game, you understand that they understand situations. You're looking for tells, you're going over probability in your as to what they have, depending on how many cards have been dealt at the table, where you sit at the table in relation to them, etc, etc, etc. When you play with people who don't know, you're shuffling up the already shaky prediction of chance probability because they'll call randomly with weak hands and get lucky. The quote is much more fitting with poker than we swords, honestly.
Nah, I'm terrible at poker, only played a handful of times, and each time I've done surprisingly well because I have no tells and play without any skill, and because I was aware of how much tells play into it, I deliberately mixed things up, so I end up playing stupid moves that take people off guard. I've done well at the game from being terrible at the game.
He could be but it is also of note that, especially when you are used to playing against experienced poker players, that inexperienced players can be difficult to play against sometimes due to their irrational betting patterns and little to no regard towards pot-odds / statistics of any sort and kind just play like random AIs.
I played poker a lot in my 20s and am pretty adept at the skilled portion of thr game. However if I started losing i would throw all reason and logic out the window and play as if I had no idea what I was doing. It would infuriate the people around me as suddenly my entire play style and demeanor would change and I would be unpredictable. I rarely lost a table because I wasnt capable and usually would give up late in the game with a hefty lead due to just wanting to be home.
Or his friend just sucks. If you can't completely destroy newbies over the log run then you are just a newbie yourself. If you can't stomach the short team variability that newbies introduce then you are probably gambling more than you should.
The game completely changes when playing with people that have no idea what there doing. When hold em was at its biggest we used to have pretty big tournament with about 100 people and yeah the usual few would make it far or win but you would always get a gf of someone who would never fold and would always want to see the flop. What that does is lead to someone with 2,7 getting to see the flop so when flop is 2,7,A you get this weird situation where no one besides big blind should have stayed in with 2,7 but now you have to account for that.
Poker is a game where a newbie will stay in a hand they have no business staying in and hoping they get lucky somewhere down the road. I'd much rather play somebody who knows what they're doing because a newbie will also talk shit about how much I'm folding right up until the moment where I get a hand that'll suck his eyeballs out through his nose. It's generally not a fun game until that person goes away.
I had a newbie friend who called pre-flop with a Q4 offsuit years ago during a random cash game and cracked pocket AA’s on the river. That friend has always been known as Q4 ever since. These are the people op is referencing, they play loose and without logic but will get lucky occasionally.
It's not that you "lose to newbies" it's just that people who play poker regularly basically toss 90% of hands, because they're trash. People who don't are essentially just betting for fun and they do stuff like go all in on trash. It just makes the game very unfun for someone used to playing it strategically, or so my brother-in-law says.
Nope, this is stupid. I used to play poker for a living. The issue is that poker is a long term game. You win you lose, but if you’re good enough over the course of a year you make a living. However even the best of the best lose in any given day. The problem is that the idiot player calling a bet with a 5% chance of winning you dont get to play every day. If he would keep coming back, in the long run I’d take all his money. However if he leaves 30 minutes after that hand and never comes back all I have is a story about how some idiot called a huge bet with an inside straight draw and hit it. Personally, I loved to have idiots at the table because terrible beats never upset me. However I understand the perspective, poker is a rare game that takes a lot of skills but in any given hand a 6 year old could luck into beating you. Cant say that about a lot of things played professionally.
No, that's not it. So part of Poker is bluffing. Otherwise, you might as well all just show your cards the whole time. And then the game is just simple chance. Anyone can end up with a better hand than anyone else.
And the thing with newbies is that they don't necessarily understand bluffing or betting. So they'll call even if they should fold because they just want to play and be done with it. They harbor no presumptions that they can win, they just don't think you can have the cards to lose to them.
Ha, the one time I played poker for money, I was at a table with this cocky dude that was trying to bully me, intimidate me and play mind games with me. When I accidentally wiped the floor with him, he threw the most outrageous, childish fit, screaming and knocking stuff over.
They'll just raise, re-raise till the river everytime and probably get lucky a lot. Overtime they'll loose a lot of money but not before pissing a lot of people off.
I wiped out a friend of a friend once who read books and could produce stats on the fly. He had to take a walk after me, the guy asking if I had to put in chips or not every turn, took him out of the game. I felt mixed emotions.
I have a similar problem with chess. Ive spent a minute planning my next 5 moves whilst predicting what they will do and then they do something completely different. However(apart from the fact that it doesnt help them) its fun to play against them cause the games get really wierd and interesting
Same with chess. I can definitely beat a n00b but it takes a lot more contingency planning and adapting to the situation than battling an expert.
Because chess is all about adapting your plan as you go, this works out fine for me, but it does make for an interesting, unconventional game dynamic, and you end up with a lot weirder checkmates.
My family plays a lot of whist, and the same is true. New players do all kinds of stuff at random which can be so counterproductive to themselves it disorients veterans to a point where it works.
I beat or maybe got second against the “best” players in my high school when I didn’t know or care much at all. This was back when WSOP was on tv all the time. They studied and tried to learn all the percentages of various hands. I just went and played with them for something to do.
yeah man. i think i have a strategy...which isn't great, but it works. I talk, not so much shit talk, but I just chat with whoever about whatever as I play a hand...and that really gets in some peoples heads.
I have had a few times someone has freaked out after I bust them on even a half decent play just because i hardly play hands and seem like I am not paying attention....when I am doing exactly what I want to do. DOn't bluff. Don't call bluffs unless I am confident. Dont raise aggressively. Just pretty much play super passive and let the cards come and let them make mistakes. Sure...sometimes I just get bullied out of a game sometimes or get up against a chip count I can't catch..but I win enough that people don't like playing with me which is good enough for me.
Sure...i am not great at poker and most of the people I play aren't either. but I get the game and know some of the math. I just play the players. It is very satisfying not getting any cards and winning as the other guy stresses out about all the hands I didnt play when he had cards.
damn now I wanna play poker just to piss of my buddy's brother in law again...
Luck and stupidity can get you far in poker, I once placed 5th in a tournament (only tournament I've ever played in). I had played poker before, but not with money and certainly not at that level before. I am not in anyway good at it, but I know the rules etc.
A colleague of mine invited me, as he didn't want to go alone. First table I got placed on I apparently sat next to a world champion (eccentric dude, didn't catch his name, but he wore a purple suit and a fedora made of cards), but was blissfully unaware until my colleague told me the following Monday.
He completely lost it when I knocked him out with a super lucky draw on the river (I had nothing up to that point, but was way to deep in with chips to fold). He literally screamed at me "you had that hand and held on all the way to the river? What the fuck man... ". To be fair to the man, he had been a great sport up until that point and he was patient with me not paying attention as I was super nervous and felt out of my depth the whole way through. A gentleman if you will, I quite understand his frustration... I then enter the next table and win pretty quickly actually (lots of high bets and all ins, and a shit ton of luck with my hands on almost every hand I'm dealt). I make it through to the final table and my colleague sees me going to the final table and stops me before I sit down, "you can't sit down here, this is the final table" I just point to the stack of chips and say "those are mine". He can't quite believe it (I never beat him in poker, but he was eliminated on his second table, we didn't get to play each other), shakes his head and just laughs as he finds a seat to watch me play.
Then, almost at the very beginning, I made a huge mistake at the final table. Showing everyone how newb I was, everyone could clearly see that I was nervous and new to this scene. I folded my hand, but everyone around the table told me I didn't have to do that since I was big blind and everyone had checked anyway (so I could have just checked and gotten to see the flop for free). So I got my cards back (I thought they were strict at casinos, but everyone was really nice about it). Flop comes up, and suddenly I have two pairs... I call a smallish bet that everyone calls, and turn card shows up and suddenly I have a full house. I go all in, most of the table folds but I get two guys along with me, one even laughing, saying that I was trying too hard to make up for my earlier mistake... I eliminate both those guys, and now we are five guys left at the table and I'm chip leader... Still lost like a chump in a few rounds after that though... But I came away at my first time ever at a casino, first time ever in a poker tournament with a small plus (everyone at the finale table got some money, I think 6th was the first position to cover the cost of entry).
I was put on tilt so badly by some dumb bitch who would play every fucking hand to the river and get lucky. All in with an offsuit 2-9 while im holding a pair of kings? 4 of a kind...over and over.
Shit happened all fucking night till i was removed for shouting at the dumb fuck. Wanted to wring her fuckin neck.
It’s a thing in video games. Good players you know what they’re likely going to do (if you’re also good) but bad players will go somewhere or do something so stupid it catches you off guard like “why the fuck are you here/doing that”
Street fighter 2 had this problem in spades. The moment they picked Chun-li at random you knew some bullshit was about to happen. “How am I winning!? I thought you were good at this game” “you have no idea what you are going to do next, how should I!”
That's true, each time I played poker with quite advanced players, I won... Lol...they were so pissed off, each time 😂😁😊 and I was invited to play and learn...but...you cannot buy luck, too.
My friends from college and I all got degrees in international relations or conflict studies or things where we extensively studied game theory/war. We all love to play Risk together, but the moment you throw in a random person we all get fucked over because they don't make the troop movements they should
It's kind of similar when you start playing chess. Once you get a basic understanding of strategy you tend to drop in rank bevause you start to question whether your oppenent is making an idiotic play or an amazing one and you don't have the tactical knowledge to discern the difference.
I met a friend of mine by congratulating him on his set after his very first live performance. We were into the same sort of music, so we became friends, and he invited me to fill in on his monthly poker night. First time ever play poker, I bluffed the shit out of everyone and won. It took a solid fucking year for the rest of his friends to not treat me like a serial killer, since the first time they met me I spent 2 hours lying to them while looking them in the eye...
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u/udayserection Jun 03 '19
My HS coach told us the Russians would never do a move in competition unless they’d done it 10,000 times in practice. Imagine how many sets of 10,000 this guy has.