Q&A #37: Some Fish Have All the Luck
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JJS asks,
I don’t have a specific hand to analyze, I have a more general question. I have been lurking in the forums at pokerlistings.com for a while and I just don’t understand a lot of the things people post there. For example, this thread.
One poster claims that it is impossible to play against “schooling fish” (my term, not his). He gives an example where pocket kings will lose to 6 callers 74% of the time, therefore it’s impossible to beat the “fish”.Then a poster named “kosh”, who incidentally claims in another post to have never played a hand of poker in his life, points out that even though you only win 1 in 4 hands, you get a 6 to 1 payoff with 6 callers.
So it seems to me that kosh is right, and the “real” players are wrong. Not only that, one of the posters (luvdoinit) seems to think that the only answer to the “problem” is to educate the fish into better players, so they won’t school any more!
Well I’m just a beginner myself, but I personally hope that people like luvdoinit don’t succeed!
What do you think, am I right about the “schooling” problem, i.e. it’s not really a problem at all, it’s a blessing?
JJS, your instincts are right. Bad play is what allows good players to make money. If everyone played equally well, then over time, everyone would get “suck outs” and “bad beats” with roughly equal frequency, and you’d just be pushing money around for temporary highs and lows. Add a rake, and everyone would inexorably lose.
Bad players allow good players to make money playing poker. It’s 100% true without exception or qualification. If your goal is to make the most money you can, you want bad players at your table.
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Tags: bad-beats, fish, fish-schooling, poker, poker-psychology, pokerlistings, running-bad, suck-outs
That reminds me of a guy who took a lot of bad beats and bitterly complained about the bad players at his table.
Player 2: “Don’t you want to play against bad players?”
Player 1: (wide-eyed and serious) “You don’t understand. A bad player will beat a good player two out of three times!”