The Pleasures of Sharing Information

The famous Texan comedian Ron White one said, “You can’t fix stupid.” And as I was reading some of the various poker blogs and articles on the web I stumbled upon one that was saying just that. I have no choice but to refute it, however. While I agree with White that a lot of stupid is well just that, stupid. But in poker, no, that dogma just doesn’t apply.

So in this article I observed a few things. Mostly it was a lot of complaining, but there was some tactics and skill in there, and I of course love to analyze tactic and skill so I couldn’t resist giving this one a run though. Ok, so there was this one player who’d been playing in some low stakes games over a weekend. This poker player says, “I saw a lot of inexperienced players make a lot of bone headed calls and win.” Well, yes, of course you did. This is called variance. No matter what the statistics say, there are times when the anomaly happens. This is simply analytical statistics here.

But it gets worse. We get to the hand analysis. The player had noticed a quirk; two of the players were very aggressive, yet very predictable. If there wasn’t a raise when it came to them, they raised almost out of habit. One of the aggressive players in casino games raised it to 10 to go in late position. The blinds were 1-2 at the moment. Big blind and a passive player at the table looked at the flop. A-K-9. BB checks, and passive player bets 5 into a 31 dollar pot. Obviously giving anyone with any sense pot odds to call with nearly anything. Well aggressive player bets out making it 15, 10 more to the passive player. Turn comes 2. Passive player betting 10, this time into a 60 dollar pot. 1/6th of the pot.

Now this is getting ridiculous even for me to try to make sense of, but I promise in good time you’ll see the point. Aggressive player raises to 25 out 15 for the passive player to go again. A little better of the pot, but still unheard of in terms of betting.

So here’s the situation. The pot is now at close to 100 dollars. It only costs our passive player 15 to see the next card. 6:1 odds on your money. Of course she calls. River comes out a 2. There are no flushes on the board. A potential QJ holding would be a problem, but anyone betting and sticking around with that to try to catch a double gutshot would have to be literally crazy.

You can’t fix stupid that’s for sure. But in this case it wasn’t a case of stupid, it was a case of bad betting. Let this be a lesson on greed.