Thinking about the Long Term with Bad Players

Marcus Bateman / Marcus Bateman / 25 March 2009 / Leave a Comment

So you're sitting down with a massive fish and playing heads up cash. The player is very loose and bad, and you quickly realise that you all you have to do is sit back, play tight and just let good hands win lots of big pots. So this is what you should do right? Wrong.

In the short term this is clearly the best way to win this player's money, but in the long term you may very well be losing out on a lot of money from these sort of players. This is simply because bad loose players are there to gamble with their opponents, not to sit back and kept being shown the nuts. If you want to be able to have both a long match with plenty of reloading, and the hopes of future matches with these sort of players, you have to get in there and play a slightly sub optimal game in order to let them fulfill their desire for action.

One of the most profitable players I ever played against would regularly come back to play me heads up over and over again - even when other good games were running - simply because I would really get in there and gamble with him. Although this would cost me money in the context of the individual matches (playing much tighter would have been a vastly superior style in the pure terms of winning the money on the day), over the few years that he kept coming back it made me much, much more money than had I just grinded him down a couple of times before he stopped playing me.

Many of the long term losers in poker are simply action junkies who love to play as many pots as possible and see what lady luck has in store for them that day. To maximize your expectation against these players you want to be keeping them as happy as possible for as long as possible - and this often means having to cater to their desire for lots of action.

Simply destroying bad players as quickly as possible is not usually the best way to win as much money as possible from them. Playing a few marginal hands and flips with them will let them experience the buzz of winning more often and keep them in the game longer - and this will always be more profitable in the long term than simply showing them the nuts over and over again until they leave out of boredom.

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