For me, the biggest tell when it comes to recognising bad players is bet sizing and hand selection in relation to position.
If a player is making abnormal bet sizes, it’s usually an indicator that they don’t really know what they’re doing ir that they are selecting sizing based on their hand strength.
The most obvious version of this is when a player cold-jams into a 1.5 - 2bb pot for anything upwards of 30 - 40bb.
I’ve seen players shove 100bb preflop when it’s unraised, so essentially they are risking their entire stack in order to win a couple of blinds.
For me that’s the biggest sign of a bad player because you don’t want to be doing this regardless of wha your hand is. If you have AA you are missing out on value and if you have 72o you are gambling everything with the worst hand possible. Any hand inbetween would also be a mistake and whenever I see a player do this to me it screams that the player doesn’t have much of a clue how to play well, if any…
The worst players are the ones that limp any two cards and are allergic to the fold button (they won’t fold trash hands to massive bets even when they completely miss the board or only get a tiny piece of the board). You take advantage of them by making a hand then taking them to value town.
Some players are just playing. My challenge is to simply see flops, FREE flops. If I run out of chips here. I don’t buy chips. I go play free on one of the plethora of other super legit online poker forums. 100% legit. Honest!
I’d agree that truly massive over bets of the pot (let’s just say 10x pot or more) are normally not a sign of strong play, but also that this is a characteristic of some of the strongest AI poker programs.
Except I signed up three years ago and played zero because the server looked and played like a text based rendition of online poker from 1995. Recently the app popped up on my FB page. So I checked it out again about 7 weeks ago. I like Omaha Hi Lo and this is one of the few poker apps offering that game. Again I play for fun. If I wanted to build it, I would. But why? This week I have banked about a million dollars of tourney tickets. Half the time I get pinged out of tournaments at critical moments. Not to mention colllusion and all the ways I personally know how to cheat. Like my right hand playing my left hand, bots, team players, etc… I would feel foolish taking this amusement too seriously. I wont buy chips. But I will pay ten bucks on a premium membership monthly to play. That’s fair for FUN. Like WSOP where I am a fake multibillionaire, but spend zero on chips there too. Thank you for your “insightful” feedback, LOL. Have a great day fake taylor swift LOL!
bad players? they play chips not hands. They watch as I bust 5 players and play a hand against me as I bust them out. Hesitate to bet. Bet too much. Easy to recognize easier to play against.
You awwww living in non-reality:)…No bolts on this site and cheating to win fake chips n collusion lol:)…I see very little in cash games n NONE here my friend…
You do know that a pocket pair only flops a set about 12.5% of the time ( 1 out of 8 ) and if you do not have A’s-K’s or Q’s it might be wise to just wait for the flop ( even with those Q’s and K’s ) and save some chips-or hit the set and surprise ppl. and collect MANY chips:).
I’m a bad player but can get to the final table with good cards.
Thanks for the thoughts above. Especially learn & apply GTO. I come from a futures trading and backgammon background where position sizing / doubling is essential. To me most of what you said has to do with position sizing.
One thing I have yet to internalize is the position location advice. I play the hand largely (maybe 70%) with position being maybe 30% ( and position to me includes players in front and behind me).
So I don’t get the idea that later position is everything. I’m sure you are right from experience and my lack of it. Are there statistics to support the position location idea?
we are more likely to realize our equity as other players are forced to play more cautiously OOP
we have more opportunities to win with aggression as we can see when other players are weak before we act
in other words, opponents get to bluff less and we get to bluff more, because they know we get to act after them, and we get to see them act before we make our decision.
there are surely statistics to bear this out but at a quick google, first thing I found was this anecdotal evidence from 1 player self-reporting on cardschat (n = 8,450)
Turn: Kd
Hero checks. Villain bets 4/5 pot. With one card to come and only 20-25% equity against a made hand, Hero folds.
1B)
Hero has As2s on the BTN and calls an MP open.
Flop: Ks 3h 5s
Villain bets 1/3 pot. Hero calls.
Turn: Kd
Villain checks. Hero checks.
River: 4h
Villain bets 2/3 pot, Hero starts thinking about Vegas and the **** Mirage.
I mean I’m making stuff up here but it’s not too far-fetched that Villain could have a hand like 66-QQ/AA that plays this way in both scenarios. In position (1A) many pps may be happy to keep betting on the turn, and bet fairly large, being ahead of lots of draws and thinking Hero unlikely to hold a K with two on the board.
Out of position (1B), the same holdings will often feel compelled to “slow down” on the turn because they no longer have the information that Hero has checked first on both streets. Hero’s range is less “capped” as a result, and Villain can’t play as much of his range aggressively. As a result, Hero gets to realize their equity on the river.
I think I had a nice graph of this somewhere, but these stats are from a fairly large sample of players and hands: Position (Again!) - #25 by lihiue
Like @Younguru evidence showed, most players are only winning from the button.
It doesn’t feel like that, because you won’t win that many more hands in late position, but you have much more control over the size of the pot. That’s a massive advantage, especially when deep stacked.
Thanks for indulging me. My question is not really whether position is better but how much better. I 100% agree there is a positional advantage.
I agree BTN in these examples is best (I saw this and folded more marginal SB hands today in a Hi/Lo tourney).
What I’m looking for is the theoretical % advantage by seat. I come from a backgammon and other betting background and also understand that there is the theoretical and actual probabilities. I also think that a lot of play is self fulfilling in that people in worse positions don’t play as aggressively or well or whatever. That is an unknowable speculation.
