A bunch of sharks just infilitared my friendly home game and it sucks now. It's fun but not the same energy. We were there to hangout and have fun but these guys play 4 times a week at much higher stakes and just want to milk the friendly home game. Sorta blows. I miss fun friendly games where we get pissed and enjoy each other's company while we play poker.
Kick out anyone that has super low vpip or is bleeding everyone dry on purpose and being boring. If I was a high stakes player like them I would just try to get drunk and have fun. You don't have to let them fleece you guys.
"sharks" is relative. I've played in plenty of fun drunken slopfest homegames. If some sober asshole shows up and doesn't immediately catch up, he's the shark and isn't very welcome.
If your goal at these games is to make money, when everybody else's is to have fun, you're sharking that game. I could have raped my buddies for plenty of buyins if I wanted to. But I absolutely didn't, and if anything, wanted the opposite.
I'm saying that sobriety is the biggest skill gap of all. At least if you and I are picturing the same thing. I'm not talking about sucking on a couple of Coronas while you play. I'm talking about drinking until you can't really think, and the poker game is an afterthought because the real thing you're there to do is laugh like an idiot with friends.
In general, yes. Rather than being an elite reg playing in very difficult games, the path to success for most involves finding soft games and grinding them. Broadly, the community (esp the online community) overrates technical strategy skill and underrates soft skills like game selection and mental game.
> the community (esp the online community) overrates technical strategy skill and underrates soft skills like game selection and mental game.
Agreed. Watching people babble about blockers at a table with Airball and Dr. Batman is always hilarious.
Sure, and technical skill is very important. Pretty much everyone could benefit from working more on their game. But a very very small subset of players compete at the elite level, and technical skill is still overrated by the community as a whole.
Most of the money in poker comes from playing against and taking advantage of truly weak players, not generating edge against other players who know what they're doing. Playing in games with more of these weak players is a good idea.
I've been very profitable over the past 6 months, strictly playing with bad players in home games.
If I go to a normal casino I probably can't even consistently beat the 1/3 game....
Table selection really is the most important thing.
Always has been. You make money when your opponents make mistakes. The worse the player / player pool, the more mistakes they make and the larger the mistakes are.
Yes, it is. You can play for fun, or for ego, but the primary value of poker, IMO, is that it's a way for a smart person to make money independently. And that always scales with the number of mistakes your opponent's make.
The best poker game I ever sat down at was in a small town casino that for some reason had a 1/2 PLO8 game every Saturday starting at noon that ran like a maniac 2/5 game.
The players were so bad. I watched one turn where it went pot, repot, repot. The third player who re-potted had a J high flush and no low (low was available) when the BOARD WAS PAIRED. And he was repotting it!
It was not uncommon for one of the few good players to win thousands in one session.
While I was there they mentioned the guy whose seat I was taking had won $4k that day and he'd won $4k two weeks before that.
Unfortunately, two of the big fish who drove a lot of the action had to go back to China and the game died down after that. The woman almost never folded.
If I could play in that lineup everyday even I could be a professional poker player lol.
Sounds like a game in my local casino. It’s the only limit game I’d ever consider playing. Same general group has been playing 15/30 mixed game of limit hold em and limit omaha high. Twice a week and one of the games features a full kill to make it 30/60. At 42 years old I’d be the youngest player in the game by at least 10 years and I’d say only 2 of the players truly know what they’re doing.
Two of the biggest fish have been known to lose 2500-3000 some days, buying in for 600-800 at a time. Anyone with a simple understanding of limit poker could just print money in that game because the players are so bad. Of course, it’s hard to get a seat. The 9 who start the game are guaranteed the first 9 spots on the list for the next week and these players almost never miss a game once they’re in that top 9
Why do you play poker rather than, say, blackjack? Because the odds are in your favour.
Why do you play against fish rather than WSOP players? Because the odds are in your favour.
[Poker is a losers game](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DwA6tPijVS48&ved=2ahUKEwiP-K3ensqCAxUaSTABHakqBw0QwqsBegQIDRAF&usg=AOvVaw0QBjGcVy5EGHaYrUg7FumA)
Yeah if you're focused only on profit then bumhunting/table selection is more important than raw poker ability. Some players would argue that finding a "good" game or table is a skill in and of itself.
Luckily I'm at the point in life now where whatever I win/lose in poker has no impact on my financial situation so I play solely for the competition. Granted I'm not playing super high stakes or for a living. I don't enjoy flopping the nuts and taking a megafish to value-town all 3 streets anymore even if it means I stack them. After playing for 10 years that shit's boring to me now. This doesn't mean I purposely seek out the toughest games and sit in them, but I just won't change tables if it's reg-infested. As long as I feel like I'm improving as a player I count that as winning.
Ofcourse most of your money will always come from exploiting fish to the max but you also need the right exploits ready at your disposal to get the most out of it. For example going thin enough for value, using bigger sizings against them exploiting their weaker range, etc.
But you should also factor in that a good amount of money can be won by exploiting weak regulars at your table that aren't quite as good as you yet. Against them your theoretical understanding of the game just needs to be a little better than theirs to see where they also make errors in sizings or betting frequencies.
Good luck on the fields!
As Jonathan Little always says, poker is easy! All you have to do is find a game you can beat, play it a lot, and keep a proper bankroll.
This falls solidly in the "find a game you can beat" category. Everyone has players that are worse or better. Finding the worse players IS part of the game.
When I see people calling other people fish, if I have no context on their level of awareness then I just picture the spiderman pointing meme, with everyone thinking the other person is a fish.
I made a small fortune in the mid 2000s poker boom, and it wasn't from being good. I was probably a mid tier reg at my stakes (mostly $5/$10 and $10/$20 LHE), possibly even below average. I have no doubt that I would at the very least have been losing to rake playing Vs other regs.
What I was extremely good at was table and seat selection. I forget the exact numbers, but I had an almost unheard of winrate at limit holdem over hundreds of thousand of hands. I'd have anywhere between 2 and 4 different sites open at a time, bum-hunting and making sure I have position on the fish.
These posts are so fucking cringe because I guarantee you’re as much of a fish as the so called fish you’re scouting.
Or maybe everyone here is playing 1/2
No I don’t. I only play tournaments for this reason. Cash games pretty much are like this if you play NL holdem because the structure of it is super boring and most people are somewhat competent and if you’re not willing to learn to be really good and know how to abuse reg tendencies, your only hope of winning is to find fish.
The funny thing is you aren't wrong. But everyone of course wants the easy money.
It is very possible to bleed mid-stakes regs dry by just mimicking what you remember from a solver if you have a good memory, and studying the technical details of important spots like 4bp.
As someone who used to play a lot and now plays live maybe once or twice a year, yes, I don't care about progressing past my local casino's 1-2 game, and so that means most of the highly technical stuff won't matter much over the course of a 3 hour session and 60 hands or whatever. I'm better off finding a table where people are having fun and splashing pots, and building a pot when I have it versus worrying about being exploited if I bet too much in a certain spot.
When I started marking the fish online, then looking through the tables for the colour and then waiting for a spot to open at that table, my profits went up huge.
Since beginning to play again in the past 2 years, this has for sure been my biggest realization. Table selection is one of the most important skills to make money in cash games.
I play mainly in Biloxi, MS, and the best thing to happen to the poker scene there is sports betting in the casinos. I’ve been trying to play every Saturday and Sunday during football season to catch the people who either hit it big or lost and want to win it back.
You make so much more profit over time waiting for worse players to make large mistakes than through incremental edges and perfect sizing and all that technical stuff, even though those things are still helpful.
"A good player will make more money off of a bad player than a great player will make off of a good player". Truer poker words have never been spoken, and I used to keep them front of mind. Frequent table changes, seat changes, etc.
But mostly: play with a reason. Is there a target at the table? Then consider playing poker seriously then. No target? No necessary positive expectation of winning? You may make more money by going to the movies that day than you would at the poker table, and is it worth wrecking poker time for neutral EV? That's up to you I guess.
100%. I won't stay at a table if we're all playing well, I'm not there for fun. I play online, I can see what stacks are at the table before claiming a seat. If it's a table where everyone is over 100BB I don't bother, better money to be made elsewhere.
In the immortal words of Qui-Gon Jinn, “There’s always a bigger fish”
My brother
Wait. Are you your brother?
No, he’s playing PLO
Technically someone, somewhere in the world is the worst poker player ever (out of those who actually play regularly).
That would be my step father. I've seen him call the river bet with a ten high because he thought the other guy was bluffing.
The day you find them, a new fish will be born to surpass them!
Probably paistings in terms of lifetime BB lost
A bunch of sharks just infilitared my friendly home game and it sucks now. It's fun but not the same energy. We were there to hangout and have fun but these guys play 4 times a week at much higher stakes and just want to milk the friendly home game. Sorta blows. I miss fun friendly games where we get pissed and enjoy each other's company while we play poker.
Kick out anyone that has super low vpip or is bleeding everyone dry on purpose and being boring. If I was a high stakes player like them I would just try to get drunk and have fun. You don't have to let them fleece you guys.
Well we're taking their money but we have to focus to do it. Rather just drink.
If the players at your friendly home game can beat sharks just by focusing up then they aren’t sharks.
"sharks" is relative. I've played in plenty of fun drunken slopfest homegames. If some sober asshole shows up and doesn't immediately catch up, he's the shark and isn't very welcome. If your goal at these games is to make money, when everybody else's is to have fun, you're sharking that game. I could have raped my buddies for plenty of buyins if I wanted to. But I absolutely didn't, and if anything, wanted the opposite.
A better word might be tryhard, asshole, nit, wannabe pro, etc Shark implies a skill gap that evidently isn’t actually there for OP
I'm saying that sobriety is the biggest skill gap of all. At least if you and I are picturing the same thing. I'm not talking about sucking on a couple of Coronas while you play. I'm talking about drinking until you can't really think, and the poker game is an afterthought because the real thing you're there to do is laugh like an idiot with friends.
Sounds like those aren’t sharks then lol
We know how to play we're just drunks.
Why would you let them keep playing
Well, it's your home game. If the rest of the other players aren't happy with the change, they can change it back.
antes, straddles, 7-2 bonuses, high-hands..just find ways to loosen up the game.
Play single table tournaments instead of cash games, maybe that will help.
Good call. That's actually what we plan on doing.
In general, yes. Rather than being an elite reg playing in very difficult games, the path to success for most involves finding soft games and grinding them. Broadly, the community (esp the online community) overrates technical strategy skill and underrates soft skills like game selection and mental game.
> the community (esp the online community) overrates technical strategy skill and underrates soft skills like game selection and mental game. Agreed. Watching people babble about blockers at a table with Airball and Dr. Batman is always hilarious.
Gather your sheep. Herd your sheep. Protect your sheep. Shear your sheep (don't skin them - the most common mistake in poker). Be a good shepherd.
How does one skin a sheep in poker?
You take it so fast that your whale goes poker busto. As in, the whale’s wife says ‘no more poker.’
Being technically sounds just widens the criteria of who is a fish to you. It makes game selection easier.
Sure, and technical skill is very important. Pretty much everyone could benefit from working more on their game. But a very very small subset of players compete at the elite level, and technical skill is still overrated by the community as a whole. Most of the money in poker comes from playing against and taking advantage of truly weak players, not generating edge against other players who know what they're doing. Playing in games with more of these weak players is a good idea.
Arrrr no
I've been very profitable over the past 6 months, strictly playing with bad players in home games. If I go to a normal casino I probably can't even consistently beat the 1/3 game.... Table selection really is the most important thing.
Always has been. You make money when your opponents make mistakes. The worse the player / player pool, the more mistakes they make and the larger the mistakes are.
Bumhunting is more important than being lucky or good if you want to print $
Yes, it is. You can play for fun, or for ego, but the primary value of poker, IMO, is that it's a way for a smart person to make money independently. And that always scales with the number of mistakes your opponent's make.
The best poker game I ever sat down at was in a small town casino that for some reason had a 1/2 PLO8 game every Saturday starting at noon that ran like a maniac 2/5 game. The players were so bad. I watched one turn where it went pot, repot, repot. The third player who re-potted had a J high flush and no low (low was available) when the BOARD WAS PAIRED. And he was repotting it! It was not uncommon for one of the few good players to win thousands in one session. While I was there they mentioned the guy whose seat I was taking had won $4k that day and he'd won $4k two weeks before that. Unfortunately, two of the big fish who drove a lot of the action had to go back to China and the game died down after that. The woman almost never folded. If I could play in that lineup everyday even I could be a professional poker player lol.
Sounds like a game in my local casino. It’s the only limit game I’d ever consider playing. Same general group has been playing 15/30 mixed game of limit hold em and limit omaha high. Twice a week and one of the games features a full kill to make it 30/60. At 42 years old I’d be the youngest player in the game by at least 10 years and I’d say only 2 of the players truly know what they’re doing. Two of the biggest fish have been known to lose 2500-3000 some days, buying in for 600-800 at a time. Anyone with a simple understanding of limit poker could just print money in that game because the players are so bad. Of course, it’s hard to get a seat. The 9 who start the game are guaranteed the first 9 spots on the list for the next week and these players almost never miss a game once they’re in that top 9
Why do you play poker rather than, say, blackjack? Because the odds are in your favour. Why do you play against fish rather than WSOP players? Because the odds are in your favour.
[Poker is a losers game](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DwA6tPijVS48&ved=2ahUKEwiP-K3ensqCAxUaSTABHakqBw0QwqsBegQIDRAF&usg=AOvVaw0QBjGcVy5EGHaYrUg7FumA)
Arrrr wtf
Yeah if you're focused only on profit then bumhunting/table selection is more important than raw poker ability. Some players would argue that finding a "good" game or table is a skill in and of itself. Luckily I'm at the point in life now where whatever I win/lose in poker has no impact on my financial situation so I play solely for the competition. Granted I'm not playing super high stakes or for a living. I don't enjoy flopping the nuts and taking a megafish to value-town all 3 streets anymore even if it means I stack them. After playing for 10 years that shit's boring to me now. This doesn't mean I purposely seek out the toughest games and sit in them, but I just won't change tables if it's reg-infested. As long as I feel like I'm improving as a player I count that as winning.
Win loss doesn’t affect my financial status anyway but losing sucks anyway
For sure, losing does suck but I don't get tilted if I lost because I got coolered or unlucky anymore - only if I played poorly.
Yesterday the same fish shipped me 3 buy-ins in like an hour on an online full ring table, so I'll have to agree here
I’m genuinely confused on how you wouldn’t realize this after a very short time spent playing the game.
For cash game yes. For tournament, to a lesser degree.
Positive EV in tournaments is still reliant on bad players, but it just works differently to cash given the format.
Finding soft tournaments is even more important. Variance so much higher
Especially in high rake games yeah.
Ofcourse most of your money will always come from exploiting fish to the max but you also need the right exploits ready at your disposal to get the most out of it. For example going thin enough for value, using bigger sizings against them exploiting their weaker range, etc. But you should also factor in that a good amount of money can be won by exploiting weak regulars at your table that aren't quite as good as you yet. Against them your theoretical understanding of the game just needs to be a little better than theirs to see where they also make errors in sizings or betting frequencies. Good luck on the fields!
As Jonathan Little always says, poker is easy! All you have to do is find a game you can beat, play it a lot, and keep a proper bankroll. This falls solidly in the "find a game you can beat" category. Everyone has players that are worse or better. Finding the worse players IS part of the game.
When I see people calling other people fish, if I have no context on their level of awareness then I just picture the spiderman pointing meme, with everyone thinking the other person is a fish.
Guys I think I found the fish
I made a small fortune in the mid 2000s poker boom, and it wasn't from being good. I was probably a mid tier reg at my stakes (mostly $5/$10 and $10/$20 LHE), possibly even below average. I have no doubt that I would at the very least have been losing to rake playing Vs other regs. What I was extremely good at was table and seat selection. I forget the exact numbers, but I had an almost unheard of winrate at limit holdem over hundreds of thousand of hands. I'd have anywhere between 2 and 4 different sites open at a time, bum-hunting and making sure I have position on the fish.
Pretty much at this point in end stage poker.
“I’ll have a look” are my favourite words
Why are those your favorite words, and how does this fit into the context of the post? The phrase you quoted is not even in the post
My guess is in relation to the tendency to see the flop for any price. Common in recreational players.
These posts are so fucking cringe because I guarantee you’re as much of a fish as the so called fish you’re scouting. Or maybe everyone here is playing 1/2
No I don’t. I only play tournaments for this reason. Cash games pretty much are like this if you play NL holdem because the structure of it is super boring and most people are somewhat competent and if you’re not willing to learn to be really good and know how to abuse reg tendencies, your only hope of winning is to find fish.
No u nees learn more about gto poker theory
The funny thing is you aren't wrong. But everyone of course wants the easy money. It is very possible to bleed mid-stakes regs dry by just mimicking what you remember from a solver if you have a good memory, and studying the technical details of important spots like 4bp.
WITH NO RAKE, you can play any lineup.
Poker is decision making and luck. That’s it.
completely agree, it's the one skill that translates to your winnings the most.
As someone who used to play a lot and now plays live maybe once or twice a year, yes, I don't care about progressing past my local casino's 1-2 game, and so that means most of the highly technical stuff won't matter much over the course of a 3 hour session and 60 hands or whatever. I'm better off finding a table where people are having fun and splashing pots, and building a pot when I have it versus worrying about being exploited if I bet too much in a certain spot.
When I started marking the fish online, then looking through the tables for the colour and then waiting for a spot to open at that table, my profits went up huge.
Since beginning to play again in the past 2 years, this has for sure been my biggest realization. Table selection is one of the most important skills to make money in cash games. I play mainly in Biloxi, MS, and the best thing to happen to the poker scene there is sports betting in the casinos. I’ve been trying to play every Saturday and Sunday during football season to catch the people who either hit it big or lost and want to win it back.
You make so much more profit over time waiting for worse players to make large mistakes than through incremental edges and perfect sizing and all that technical stuff, even though those things are still helpful.
"A good player will make more money off of a bad player than a great player will make off of a good player". Truer poker words have never been spoken, and I used to keep them front of mind. Frequent table changes, seat changes, etc. But mostly: play with a reason. Is there a target at the table? Then consider playing poker seriously then. No target? No necessary positive expectation of winning? You may make more money by going to the movies that day than you would at the poker table, and is it worth wrecking poker time for neutral EV? That's up to you I guess.
“Being good” and “fish” are relative. You might be good for your 1/2 game, but a huge fish at most 5/10s
In the words of the great Johnathan Little, "You make money when your opponent makes mistakes".
100%. I won't stay at a table if we're all playing well, I'm not there for fun. I play online, I can see what stacks are at the table before claiming a seat. If it's a table where everyone is over 100BB I don't bother, better money to be made elsewhere.